Phase estimation of distributed scatterer for high resolution data stacks in nonurban areas

It has been proven that SqueeSAR technique has validated the potential to increase the density of measure points (MP) involving persistent scatter (PS) and distributed scatter (DS) candidate in nonurban areas. In SqueeSAR, DS candidate exhibiting high extended temporal coherence can be processed jointly with PS for deformation estimation after phase estimation by the phase triangulation algorithm (PTA). The PTA extracts phase values of DS by using all possible interferograms under the Gaussian scattering assumption. However, the statistics hypothesis, Gaussian random variable, is no more applicable, with radar resolution increasing. More precisely, it has been shown that clutter in high resolution SAR images can be modeled as a compound Gaussian process. In this letter, a modified approach to phase estimation of DS named MPTA is proposed based on the compound Gaussian model. Experiments on real data are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.