An estimation method for InSAR interferometric phase using correlation weight joint subspace projection

In this article, we propose a method to estimate the synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) interferometric phase based on the model of correlation weight joint pixel by using the joint subspace projection technique. In the method, the correlation weight joint data vector is constructed and the data vector can make the noise subspace dimension of the corresponding weight covariance matrix which is not affected by the coregistration error, thus avoiding the trouble of calculating the noise subspace dimension before estimating the InSAR interferometric phase. The method takes advantage of the coherence information of neighboring pixel pairs to auto-coregister the SAR images and employs the projection of the joint signal subspace onto the corresponding joint noise subspace to estimate the terrain interferometric phase. The method can auto-coregister the SAR images and reduce the interferometric phase noise simultaneously. Theoretical analysis and computer simulation results show that the method can provide accurate estimate of the interferometric phase (interferogram) even when the coregistration error reaches one pixel. The effectiveness of the method is verified via simulated data and real data.