Generation of speckle-reduced phase images from three complex parts for synthetic aperture radar interferometry

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has applications in many fields. However, decorrelation speckle noise hinders the wider application of InSAR. In this letter, we propose an innovative method termed contoured correlation interferometry to generate speckle-noise-reduced phase images. This method only needs three part images of the two complex images instead of four for the conventional method, which is a significant advantage if processing synthetic aperture radar images on satellites. It proves an efficient tool that reduces speckle noise while preserving the phase derived, which is one of most difficult problems in InSAR data processing. The proposed method can serve as an alternative to generate better InSAR interferograms, whose physical meaning is clearer.