EFFICIENCY AND COHERENCE IMPROVEMENT FOR MULTI APERTURE INTERFEROGRAM (MAl)

While conventional interferometric SAR (InSAR) technique is an excellent tool for displacement observation, it is only sensitive to one-dimensional deformation along the satellite's line-of-sight (LOS). Recently, a multiple aperture interferogram (MAI) technique has been developed to overcome this drawback. This method successfully extracted along-track displacements from InSAR data, based on split-beam InSAR processing, to create forward- and backward- looking interferograms, and was superior to along-track displacements derived by pixel-offset algorithm. This method is useful to measure along-track displacements. However, it does not only decrease the coherence of MAI because three co-registration and resampling procedures are required for producing MAI, but also is confined to a suitable interferometric pair of SAR images having zero Doppler centroid. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust method to generate MAI from interferometric pair having non-zero Doppler centroid. The proposed method efficiently improves the coherence of MAI, because the co-registration of forward- and backward- single look complex (SLC) images is carried out by time shift property of Fourier transform without resampling procedure. It also successfully removes azimuth flat earth and topographic phases caused by the effect of non-zero Doppler centroid. We tested the proposed method using ERS images of the Mw 7.1 1999 California, Hector Mine Earthquake. The result shows that the proposed method improved the coherence of MAI and generalized MAI processing algorithm.