An Adaptive Multilook Approach of Multitemporal Interferometry Based on Complex Covariance Matrix for SAR Small Datasets

Adaptive multilooking is a critical processing step in multi-temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) measurement, especially in small temporal baseline subsets. Various amplitude-based adaptive multilook approaches have been proposed for the improvement of interferometric processing. However, the phase signal, which is fundamental in interferometric systems, is typically ignored in these methods. To fully exploit the information in complex SAR images, a nonlocal adaptive multilooking is proposed based on complex covariance matrix in this work. The complex signal is here exploited for the similiarity measurement between two pixels. Given the complexity of objects in SAR images, structure feature detection is introduced to adaptively estimate covariance matrix. The effectiveness and reliability of the proposed approach are demonstrated with experiments both on simulated and real data.