Modified patch-based locally optimal Wiener method for interferometric SAR phase filtering

This paper presents a modified patch-based locally optimal Wiener (PLOW) method for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) phase filtering. PLOW is a linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) estimator based on a Gaussian additive noise condition. It jointly estimates moments, including mean and covariance, using a non-local technique. By using similarities between image patches, this method can effectively filter noise while preserving details. When applied to InSAR phase filtering, three modifications are proposed based on spatial variant noise. First, pixels are adaptively clustered according to their coherence magnitudes. Second, rather than a global estimator, a locally adaptive estimator is used to estimate noise covariance. Third, using the coherence magnitudes as weights, the mean of each cluster is estimated, using a weighted mean to further reduce noise. The performance of the proposed method is experimentally verified using simulated and real data. The results of our study demonstrate that the proposed method is on par or better than the non-local interferometric SAR (NL-InSAR) method.