Polarimetric Interferometric Phase Linking Method Considering Time-Series Scattering Consistency

Phase linking is the crucial step in distributed scatterer InSAR processing, which determines the quality of time-series interferometric phases. The weight matrix is the key measure of phase linking method, which controls the participation of each interferometric pair for the single-master phase linking. Existing methods don’t consider the impacts of temporal-changed polarimetric scattering characteristics, leading to large phase closure errors. Based on the polarimetric stationarity, we propose a novel scattering consistency weight measure. Combined with the coherence weight, a joint weight is generated to improve three general phase linking methods. The methods are validated with time-series Radarsat-2 PolSAR data over Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii. The results show that the proposed methods obtain higher temporal posterior coherence and better equivalent single-master (ESM) interferometric phase than traditional methods.