A New Polarimetric Persistent Scatterer Interferometry Method Using Temporal Coherence Optimization

Abstract

While polarimetric persistent scatterer InSAR (PSI) is an effective technique for increasing the number and quality of selected PS pixels, existing methods are suboptimal; a polarimetric channel combination is selected for each pixel based either on amplitude, which works well only for high-amplitude scatterers such as man-made structures, or on the assumption that pixels in a surrounding window all have the same scattering mechanism. In this paper, we present a new polarimetric PSI method in which we use a phase-based criterion to select the optimal channel for each pixel, which can work well even in nonurban environments. This algorithm is based on polarimetric optimization of temporal coherence, as defined in the Stanford Method for PS (StaMPS), to identify the scatterers with stable phase characteristics. We form all possible copolar and cross-polar interferograms from the available polarimetric channels and find the optimum coefficients for each pixel using defined search spaces to optimize the temporal coherence. We apply our algorithm, PolStaMPS, to an area in the Tehran basin that is covered primarily by vegetation. Our results confirm that the algorithm substantially improves on StaMPS performance, increasing the number of PS pixels by 48%, 80%, and 82% with respect to HH+VV, VV, and HH channels, respectively, and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of selected pixels.