IMPROVED TOPOGRAPHIC MAPPING IN VEGETATED MOUNTAINOUS AREAS BY HIGH-RESOLUTION RADARGRAMMETRY-ASSISTED SAR INTERFEROMETRY

Abstract. In densely vegetated mountainous areas, the height measurement accuracy of SAR interferometry is contaminated by phase unwrapping errors and volume scattering effects of the vegetation. Aiming at this limitation of InSAR, we propose the high-resolution radargrammetry-assisted SAR interferometry method to achieve high-precision topographic mapping. Specifically speaking, we propose to apply our methods in the TerraSAR-X images with a repeat-pass InSAR pair and a stereo radargrammetric pair sharing the same master image which can avoid radarcoding the reference DEM and minimize the acquisition time discrepancy between the reference DEM and InSAR data. Compared with medium-resolution reference DEM, the high-resolution radargrammetric DEM can simulate the reference topographic phase more accurately which reduces the InSAR phase unwrapping errors. In addition to the removal of the reference topographic phase, we automatically select reliable points from radargrammetric DEM for calibrating the absolute InSAR phase offset. Finally, we fuse the radargrammetric DEM and InSAR DEM together with weights determined from theoretical height error to fill in data voids in InSAR DEM. The experimental results show that the DEM generated by radargrammetry-assisted SAR interferometry has better height accuracy than DEM generated by either single method.