Highly Accurate DSM Reconstruction Using Ku-Band Airborne InSAR
| Citation: | Okada, Y.; Hirao, C.; Horiuchi, T.; Hara, Y.; Yedidia, J.S.; Azarbayejani, A.; Oishi, N., "Highly Accurate DSM Reconstruction Using Ku-band Airborne InSAR", IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Symposium (IGARSS), ISBN: 978-1-4244-1211-2, pp. 5049-5052, July 2007 (IEEE Xplore) |
| MERL Report: | TR2007-064 |
Factor graph used in MERL's phase-unwrapping algorithm to define the probability of an unwrapped configuration of phases and integer shifts.
We present a newly developed airborne InSAR system incorporating a novel phase unwrapping algorithm, capable of retrieving a highly accurate Digital Surface Model (DSM). The SAR sensor system, with a spatial resolution of 30 cm, is carried on an airborne platform which has two antennas placed at a baseline length of 1 meter. We have established a DSM reconstruction processing technique, which includes the new "Iterated Conditional Modes-Minimum Cost Flow" (ICM-MCF) phase-unwrapping algorithm. The ICM-MCF algorithm finds a locally optimal configuration of unwrapped phases under a well-characterized statistical model of the terrain and noise. An experimental field observation was carried out in Tsukuba, Japan. The DSM was generated, and the height accuracy of the SAR-DSM was evaluated by comparing with laser pro-filer data. For 50 cm X 50 cm mesh an accuracy of better than 50 cm in height was confirmed.
 | Read the full technical report (PDF: 857.2 kB) |