Baseline Design for Multibaseline InSAR System: A Review

Multibaseline (MB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) is an exciting and growing remote sensing technique, which can improve the traditional InSAR from the ill-posed problem to the well-posed problem. Baseline lengths play an important role in the MB InSAR system design. It is fair to say that the baseline lengths of the MB InSAR system directly determine the quality of the MB InSAR products. In this article, we present an overview of the established MB baseline design criteria and requirements for the MB InSAR digital elevation model (DEM) generation, which includes the effect of the baseline lengths and their estimation errors on ambiguity height, DEM accuracy, decorrelation, and MB phase unwrapping robustness. In addition, we prospectively apply the geometric programming technique to combine those effects together for obtaining the global optimal baseline lengths of the MB InSAR system. It is our hope that this review will provide guidelines to future researchers to enhance further the new airborne and spaceborne MB InSAR system developments.