High-quality pixel selection in ground-based SAR interferometry based on pseudo- and quasi-permanent scatterers analyses

Due to the presence of phase noise and temporal decorrelation, high-quality pixel selection has been an indispensable part in ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GB-SAR) interferometry. The main pixel selection methods are permanent scatterer (PS) methods and coherent scatterer methods. However, both of them cannot properly solve the false-selection and the miss-selection caused by intrinsic scattering and temporal characteristics of the pixel on the whole dataset. Pseudo-PS and quasi-PS are first introduced into the high-quality pixel selection of GB-SAR interferometry, and a temporal selection method (TSM) is proposed to avoid the miss-selection of quasi-PS. Then, in order to achieve appropriate pixel density and high-quality pixels for deformation monitoring, a high-quality interferometric pixel selection method based on pseudo- and quasi-permanent scatterers analyses is proposed, which is a joint processing technique combining spatial variant apodization with TSM. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed high-quality pixel selection method is validated by the field measurements of GB-SAR data.