IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 52, NO.
1, JANUARY 2014
Adaptive Multilooking of Airborne Single-Pass
Multi-Baseline InSAR Stacks
Michael Schmitt, Student Member, IEEE, and Uwe Stilla, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Multilooking is a critical task in interferometric
synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. While there are many
algorithms designed for SAR image pairs and also some first
approaches for multi-temporal satellite data stacks, no method
suitable to airborne single-pass stacks that typically contain just
a small number of multi-baseline acquisitions has been proposed
yet. This paper presents an adaptive procedure to determine re-
gions of homogeneous backscattering in heterogeneous scenes such
as urban areas. Based on these regions, the complex covariance
matrices can be estimated for all pixels in the stack. This step en-
ables the retrieval of all relevant information of the multi-baseline
InSAR data set, e.g., despeckled intensity images, interferometric
phase observations, and related coherence maps. The denoising
efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated and compared to
different algorithms. Furthermore, the detail preservation is ana-
lyzed in order to prove the validity of the homogeneity assumption.
Index Terms—Adaptive filtering, despeckling, multi-baseline,
multilooking, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), SAR interferome-
try (InSAR), urban areas.
I. I NTRODUCTION
O NE of the core tasks in synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
interferometry (InSAR) is interferometric multilooking
for both the estimation of the complex coherence and the
denoising of the interferometric phase [1]. In the low- and
medium-resolution beginnings of InSAR mapping, fixed-size
boxcar windows were commonly used as the hypothesis of sta-
tistical homogeneity of neighboring pixels could be considered
valid for most scenes [2]. However, this approach has become
unsuitable since decimeter resolution sensors have made the
analysis of urban areas possible [3]–[7]. Since, now, the focus
of SAR remote sensing has shifted from resolutions of several
meters and homogeneous scenes such as agricultural land or
rural topography, respectively, to resolutions in the decimeter
range and heterogeneous scenes such as urban areas [8], more
sophisticated adaptive methods have to be found in order to
ensure an unbiased estimation of interferometric phase and
coherence.
Many papers have been published on the issue of adaptive
filtering by exploiting homogeneous pixel neighborhoods. The
first group mainly focused on the problem of speckle filtering
Manuscript received August 14, 2012; revised October 18, 2012,
November 27, 2012, and December 28, 2012; accepted December 28, 2012.
Date of publication February 26, 2013; date of current version November 26,
2013.
The authors are with the Department of Photogrammetry and Remote
Sensing, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, 80333 Munich, Germany (e-mail:
michael.schmitt@bv.tum.de; stilla@tum.de).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2013.2238947
0196-2892 © 2013 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
305
for single amplitude or intensity images, respectively [9]–[11];
a comprehensive survey of the methods published during the
1980s and 1990s can be found in [12]. Via the application to
multi-temporal imagery [13], the general idea of these filters
was gradually extended to interferometric SAR data, now aim-
ing at an unbiased estimation of phase and coherence [14]–
[17]. Based on the newly introduced idea of nonlocal image
denoising [18], [19], finally, a sophisticated nonlocal filter for
interferometric SAR image pairs, NL-InSAR, was proposed
by Deledalle et al. [20]. The core idea of this approach is
that no discrete neighborhood of homogeneous pixels has to
be detected; instead, all pixels are used for the simultane-
ous estimation of intensity, coherence, and phase by applying
weights with respect to statistical similarity. Although NL-
InSAR provides very promising results, it cannot be used for
InSAR stacks containing more than two single-look complex
(SLC) SAR images as the derivation of the algorithm is based
on bivariate data sets. Furthermore, due to its nonlocal nature,
no distinct determination of homogeneous neighborhoods is
included, whereas some applications, e.g., distributed compres-
sive sensing [21], [22], need sets of statistically homogeneous
SLC pixels as input data instead of just filtered phase values.
For the same reason, some first papers have been pub-
lished about the adaptive filtering of multi-baseline data sets,
since, during the last years, the exploitation of interferomet-
ric stacks has become an important topic in SAR research.
Ferretti et al. [23] proposed DespecKS, an algorithm em-
bedded in their SqueeSAR procedure that uses a two-sample
Kolmogorov–Smirnov test in order to evaluate if two stack
pixels within a predefined search window belong to the same
statistical distribution. Parizzi and Brcic [24] further investi-
gated the approach employing also Kullback–Leibler diver-
gence, Anderson–Darling test, and generalized likelihood ratio
test. The mentioned approaches based on statistical goodness-
of-fit tests, however, suffer from one common disadvantage: As
we can see from the literature about the most robust among
them, they typically work only for eight samples and up [25].
Aiming to overcome the limitation on the large sample
number inherent to [23] and [24], this paper proposes an
algorithm for the adaptive multilooking of airborne single-pass
multi-baseline InSAR stacks that typically consist only of a
low number of simultaneously acquired images (three to five).
While the homogeneity determination of the goodness-of-fit-
based algorithms is built around the comparison of statistical
distributions for each pixel, derived from the sample amplitude
values of the respective pixel, we intend to concentrate the
information of the stack—no matter how many acquisitions
it consists—via principal component (PC) analysis (PCA). A
306 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 52, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
filtered version of the first PC is then used to declare homoge-
neous pixels using just a simple thresholding.
The principle goal of this paper is, finally, the estimation
of the complex covariance matrix of all pixels in the stack as
unbiased as possible. Note that, usually, the local phase fringe
frequency has to be eliminated for a fully unbiased estimate
of the covariance matrix [26]–[28]. Since we put the focus on
the capability to determine homogeneous neighborhoods, we
consider a renunciation of the defringing operation a valid ap-
proximation for small patch sizes and a relatively large ambigu-
ity height (see Section IV-A). Nevertheless, we further analyze
the covariance information by extracting despeckled intensity
images and the longest baseline interferograms (as the longest
baseline provides the most details) in order to validate the
adaptivity of the approach. By detailed evaluation of the derived
products with respect to existing filtering methods, we show the
feasibility of the determination of homogeneous backscattering
neighborhoods, which can be also used for purposes other than
multilooking as described earlier.
In Section II, the proposed method will be explained; in
Section III, a short recap of complex covariance matrix esti-
mation for InSAR stacks will be given. Section IV will contain
experiments and their results based on real airborne data which
will be discussed in Section V.
II. P RINCIPAL C OMPONENT A NALYSIS -BASED
T HRESHOLDING
In this section, we propose a thresholding-based proce-
dure carried out on the first principal component of the
stack of logarithmic amplitude images of the data set. The
principal component analysis is applied in order to get a
more reliable indicator of backscattering homogeneity as
would be possible from one raw amplitude image alone (see
Section II-A). After the PCA, as described in Section II-B,
a TV-norm-based denoising algorithm [29] is used in order
to receive a more reliable indicator of backscattering energy
on which, then, a sliding window is moved across. Within
the sliding window, a thresholding is applied that yields the
pixels of the window that are considered to show homogeneous
backscattering.
A. Principal Component Analysis of the InSAR Stack
Principal component analysis is a well-known mathematical
method that uses an orthogonal transformation in order to
convert a data set into a set of linearly uncorrelated variables,
called principal components [30]. The idea is to identify linear
combinations of the original variables that contain most of the
information present in the data. This is based on the assumption
that useful information is proportional to the variance of the
data. Since the number of PCs is less than or equal to the
number of original variables, the method is often employed for
dimension reduction.
Considering a stack of N coregistered SAR amplitude im-
ages, we propose a transformation of the stack onto its PCs.
In order to ensure that the Gaussian assumption that it is a
prerequisite for a correct application of PCA is met at least
approximately, we apply the decadic logarithm to the approxi-
mately Rayleigh-distributed amplitude images [31]. Afterward,
we put all the amplitude values of the stack into a 2-D data
matrix X = [x1 . . . xN ]T with xi being the pixel values of
image i put into a row vector. This means that the rows of
X describe the images of the stack as variables, whereas the
columns denote the logarithmic amplitude values as observa-
tions of these variables. After mean centering of the data set,
i.e., subtraction of the row means, the data covariance matrix is
estimated by
1
K= XXT . (1)
P −1
P denotes the number of pixels in one image, and K quantifies
the correlations between all possible pairs of observed ampli-
tudes. Since we want to reduce any redundancies, i.e., exploit
redundant observations in order to remove noise, we seek a
transformation of the data such that the covariances between
separate measurements become zero.
Therefore, K is decomposed by eigenvalue decomposition,
i.e.,
K = EDET (2)
where E is a matrix containing the eigenvectors of K and D
is a diagonal matrix containing the related eigenvalues. The
transformation matrix we are looking for is then simply defined
by A = ET , if the eigenvectors contained in E are ordered with
respect to their related eigenvalues (from the largest eigenvalue
to the smallest one).
Finally, we are able to project our stack of amplitude images
onto its PCs using
X̃ = AX. (3)
X̃ then consists of N rows and P columns where each row
represents one PC of the data set. Since we assume that the first
PC (PC1) contains most relevant signal information, while the
other PCs contain only noise (cf., Fig. 1), we just keep PC1, i.e.,
the first row of X̃, as input to the neighborhood homogeneity
test. Exemplary relations between the first PC and the following
ones for stacks of different size can be found in Fig. 2. It can
be seen that a distinction between signal and noise information
is, of course, not possible with one image alone, whereas the
relative share of signal energy contained in the first PC becomes
less for larger stacks until, at some point, convergence will
be reached. Note that the relationship between the single PCs
depends on the overall noise level.
B. TV Denoising
After the data have been projected onto the first PC, a TV-
norm-based image denoising algorithm is used to receive an
even more reliable indicator of the backscattering character-
istics of the scene [29]. The algorithm combines the split
Bregman method for L1-norm regularization problems [32]
with the Rudin–Osher–Fatemi problem [33], which basically
consists of estimating a denoised image u as the solution of the
minimization

λ
min uTV + (f (x) − u(x))2 dx (4)
2
SCHMITT AND STILLA: ADAPTIVE MULTILOOKING OF AIRBORNE SINGLE-PASS MULTI-BASELINE InSAR STACKS
Fig. 1. (Left column) Example of PCA on a stack of four logarithmic
amplitude images. The corresponding PCs are shown in the right column, from
top to bottom sorted by their corresponding eigenvalues. In this case, the first
PC accounted for 82% of the signal energy.
where λ is a positive regularization parameter that can be
determined by methods like generalized cross-validation or
L-curve [34]. f = u + n describes the relation between the
noisy image f , the denoised image u, and the additive white
Gaussian noise n.  · TV denotes the TV norm, which helps
to avoid the solution having oscillating behavior while still
allowing the solution to have discontinuities. The second term
in (4) ensures that the solution of the optimization is as close
as possible to the observed image f . The resulting image then
is a filtered version of the main PC with a high rate of detail
and edge preservation that serves as a very good index for the
following homogeneity investigation.
C. Thresholding
A flowchart of the proposed procedure is shown in Fig. 3.
Inspired by [23], we define a sliding search window (11 ×
11 in our case, equal to about 1 m2 ) that moves from pixel
to pixel, such that each pixel is considered as a center pixel
of the search window once. Within the window, all pixels
307
Fig. 2. Relative share of the eigenvalues corresponding to the PCs of data
stacks with different number of images is plotted exemplarily. The sum of
all eigenvalues always gives the entire energy content in the signal or image,
respectively. Note that the number of PCs is always less than or equal to the
number of available images.
Fig. 3. Flowchart of the proposed method. Note that, after the thresholding,
an eight-connectivity check is applied.
are checked for similarity to the respective center pixel by a
simple thresholding. The main advantages of this approach over
region-growing-based algorithms are the speed and a natural
upper limit of the number of tested pixels given by the search
window size. This limited extent enhances the chance that
the homogeneous patch as detected by the algorithm really
just corresponds to one certain backscattering phenomenon of
the scene. If, on the contrary, the emphasis is put on larger
neighborhoods and stronger filtering, the search window size
can easily be enlarged by the cost of computational speed and
robustness of the thresholding step.
308 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 52, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014

Fig. 5. Size of the homogeneous neighborhood as detected for each pixel.

Note how particularly strong scatterers are generally just composed of very few
pixels, while homogeneous areas use almost the whole search window most of
the time.

III. C OVARIANCE M ATRIX E STIMATION

After a neighborhood of homogeneous backscattering has
been determined by the procedure proposed in Section II-C, the
SLC pixel vectors can be extracted from the original InSAR
Fig. 4. Thresholding on filtered main PC for (left) a heterogeneous as well as
(right) a homogeneous image patch. From top to bottom, the search windows stack in order to estimate the complex covariance matrix C =
extracted from the main PC, the TV-filtered window, and the thresholding result E{zz∗ } for every pixel by
are shown: Pixels that passed the thresholding test and are included in the
1 
homogeneous neighborhood are marked. P
Ĉ = zp z∗p (6)
P i=1
Within this search window, a simple and straightforward
thresholding is applied where P denotes the number of pixels in the neighborhood and
zi is the vector of complex observations for pixel p [35]. The
|gp − gc |2 ≤ σ. (5) superscript ∗ describes the conjugate transpose.
The most interesting characteristic of the complex covariance
gc denotes the PC1 value of the center pixel, gp denotes matrix of InSAR stacks is that the covariance information is
the PC1 value of the tested pixel, and σ denotes the standard directly related to the denoised interferometric measurements
deviation (STD) of the whole first PC image. The reason √ √
⎡ I1 γ12 I1 I2 . . . γ1N √I1 IN ⎤
we take the distance between gp and gc to the power of
∗
two is motivated by the consideration that small differences ⎢ γ12 I2 . . . γ2N I2 IN ⎥
(< 1) are mellowed, whereas larger differences (> 1) are even Ĉ = ⎢⎣ .. .. .. .. ⎥ . (7)
⎦
. . . .
emphasized. From empirical trials, we found that, this way, also ∗
√ ∗
√
γ1N I1 IN γ2N I2 IN . . . IN
outlier pixels that sometimes occur within homogeneous areas
are mitigated. The Ii denotes the (despeckled) intensities of all N acquisi-
Finally, after the thresholding, an eight-connectivity check is tions in the stack, whereas
carried out in order to ensure that only pixels connected to the

central pixel are considered to belong to the same backscatter- E zi zj∗
ing area. An example of the thresholding for a heterogeneous
as well as a homogeneous image patch can be seen in Fig. 4.
In a final step, it would be possible to check the detected
neighborhood for a minimum size, e.g., in order to ensure a
minimum amount of smoothing or the estimation of a non-
singular covariance matrix. By default, we set the minimum
neighborhood size to one pixel as we intend to show the natural
behavior of the proposed method.
An example of the final neighborhood size for every pixel
can be seen in Fig. 5.
γij =  = |γij | exp(jφij ) (8)
Ii Ij
is defined as the complex coherence, which, itself, is composed
of the magnitude of coherence (or correlation) |γij | and the
interferometric phase φij between acquisitions i and j, where
zi and zj are the related complex observations.
Applying the normalization of (8) to (7) such that the main
diagonal of the covariance matrix becomes a unity vector, we
receive the so-called coherence (or correlation) matrix as in (9)
shown at the bottom of the next page.
SCHMITT AND STILLA: ADAPTIVE MULTILOOKING OF AIRBORNE SINGLE-PASS MULTI-BASELINE InSAR STACKS 309

The bottom line of this recap is that, by just calculating TABLE I

the covariance matrix of a multi-baseline InSAR data stack
based on an adaptive neighborhood that ensures statistical ho-
mogeneity, all relevant information can be deduced: despeckled
intensity images, all possible interferograms, and, finally, all
related coherence maps. In the context of this work, however,
we use only the extracted intensity and phase images for the
evaluation of the proposed methodology, since our primary
goal is the determination of homogeneous neighborhoods for
covariance matrix estimation.
IV. E XPERIMENTS AND R ESULTS
In order to evaluate whether the proposed filtering approach
meets the requirements, we apply it to real test data of the
airborne multi-baseline cross-track interferometer MEMPHIS
(see Section IV-A for details). The results are compared to
three specifically chosen state-of-the-art multilooking proce-
dures that are summarized hereinafter.
1) Boxcar multilooking
Boxcar multilooking is the standard procedure that
has efficiently been used for low- and medium-resolution
InSAR pairs of natural, relatively homogeneous areas
mainly showing distributed scattering behavior. It is eas-
ily applied to multi-baseline stacks. For this assessment,
an 11 × 11 window was employed.
2) DespecKS
Being the first multilooking approach specifically de-
signed for stacks of SAR imagery, this method is consid-
ered a direct benchmark. Again, an 11 × 11 test window
was used.
3) NL-InSAR
Although NL-InSAR was established for just single
pairs of InSAR data, and although it does not aim
at the detection of clearly defined homogeneous
neighborhoods, at the moment, it is the most efficient
multilooking algorithm to our knowledge. The MATLAB
implementation provided at http://www.ceremade.
dauphine.fr/~deledall/nlinsar.php is therefore used for
comparison. Please note that, although NL-InSAR is not
meant to be a window-based algorithm (instead, all pixels
are supposed to be considered in a nonlocal manner), in
the provided implementation, a 21 × 21 window is used
due to computational reasons.
A. MEMPHIS Test Data set
For a detailed assessment of the proposed method, test data
acquired by the MEMPHIS sensor in 2011, provided by the
T EST DATA S YSTEM PARAMETERS
Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar
Techniques, were used [36], [37]. For detailed specifications,
see Table I.
The raw intensity image of the stack’s master image as well
as the single-look interferometric phase of the longest available
baseline is compiled together with the filtering results in Fig. 6.
B. Filtering Efficiency
The main demand for any filter or—in the case of InSAR
data—multilooking procedure is a high filtering efficiency, i.e.,
a combination of variance reduction and mean preservation.
However, these measures, which have to be calculated for an
exemplary homogeneous image patch, may provide a biased
view on the evaluation in some cases. Therefore, we added
the speckle suppression index (SSI) as well as the speckle
suppression and mean preservation index (SMPI) in order to
get a more detailed impression of the filtering efficiency of our
method. The SSI is calculated as follows [38]:
σ f μ0
SSI = · . (10)
μf σ 0
μ0 , μf , σ0 , and σf denote the means and the STDs of the
original and the filtered images, respectively. For an efficient
performance in speckle reduction, the SSI is usually less
than one.
Since the SSI, however, tends to be unreliable if the filter
overestimates the mean value, in [38], the calculation of the
more sophisticated SMPI by
σf
SMPI = (1 + |μ0 − μf |) · (11)
σ0
was proposed. The lower the SMPI values are, the better the
filter performs in terms of mean preservation and variance
reduction.
A comparison of the relevant numerical evaluation results
of the experiment can be found in Fig. 7. For this, the means
and STDs of the intensity as well as the longest baseline phase
images were measured over a homogeneous patch in the lower

⎡ 1 |γ12 | exp(jφ12 ) ... |γ1N | exp(jφ1N ) ⎤

⎢ |γ21 | exp(jφ21 ) 1 ... |γ2N | exp(jφ2N ) ⎥
C̃ = ⎢
⎣ .. .. .. .. ⎥
⎦ (9)
. . . .
|γN 1 | exp(jφN 1 ) |γN 2 | exp(jφN 2 ) ... 1
310 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 52, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
Fig. 6. (Left) Intensity images. (Right) Interferometric phase maps for longest
available baseline. (From top to bottom) Single-look data, boxcar mean filter
(11 × 11; four images), DespecKS (11 × 11; four images), NL-InSAR
(21 × 21; two images), and PCA-based thresholding (11 × 11; four images).
The rectangles indicate the zoom area that is shown in Fig. 8.
left part of the test scene. From these measures, SSI and SMPI
have been deduced. It can clearly be observed that all filters
that were used in the experiments led to a certain decrease in
the STDs of intensity as well as phase. A closer look taken at
SSI and SMPI reveals that both PCA-based thresholding and
NL-InSAR provide results that are comparable to the efficiency
of the boxcar filter. Only DespecKS was not able to reduce the
variance of the intensity image significantly, which is certainly
caused by the fact that the number of available samples for the
Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was too low.
Fig. 7. Filtering efficency analyzed by STD, SSI, and SMPI.
C. Detail Preservation
Next to the filtering efficiency over homogeneous patches,
the capability to preserve fine details, e.g., edges or strong
point scatterers, is a critical feature for every adaptive filter.
In Fig. 8, a comparison of detail preservation for the different
filtering approaches is shown using a zoom onto the facade of
the main building in the scene. This cutout provides both an
edge between ground and facade and a row of strong scatterers
on the facade. It can easily be seen that the boxcar filter blurs
the edge as well as the point scatterers, while all sophisticated
algorithms are able to preserve scene details to a certain extent.
DespecKS is probably the best detail-preserving method to the
cost of less efficient filtering in the cases where only a low
number of images are available. Our PCA-based thresholding
approach yields results quite similar to NL-InSAR, although
NL-InSAR seems to be slightly better on balance if the facade
parts showing a weaker scattering and the few dark spots that
have not been properly filtered by PCA-based thresholding are
considered.
V. D ISCUSSION
From inspection of the qualitative and quantitative experi-
mental results shown in Section IV-B and C, it can be seen that
the PCA-based thresholding approach proposed in this paper
provides a filtering efficiency comparable to both the classical
boxcar and the more sophisticated NL-InSAR algorithm. Both
methods are known for very high denoising efficiency; more-
over, it is well known that the boxcar filter can be considered
optimal in the case of homogeneous areas. DespecKS, however,
is not as efficient as the competitors, which is supposed to be
caused by the low number of samples (four per pixel in the
MEMPHIS case), while at least eight would be needed for a
significant goodness-of-fit test.
Comparing the results with respect to detail preservation,
we see that—as expected—the boxcar filter destroys strong
scatterers and blurs lines and edges. In contrast to this, all other
filters are able to keep single-point scatterers and even enhance
edges and other linear structures.
SCHMITT AND STILLA: ADAPTIVE MULTILOOKING OF AIRBORNE SINGLE-PASS MULTI-BASELINE InSAR STACKS 311

temporal data stacks, it is less efficient for single-pass stacks

with typically distinctly less than eight acquisitions. Therefore,
we come to the conclusion that PCA-based thresholding conve-
niently closes a gap between NL-InSAR (for standard interfer-
ometric pairs) and DespecKS (for multi-temporal InSAR stacks
with more than eight acquisitions).
The nice thing about the proposed method is the following:
The minimum number of necessary images in the stack is
just two (or a single baseline), because even just two images
allow for a certain separation of signal and noise via PCA.
Starting from two images, a meaningful covariance matrix can
be estimated. This would not equal any special case; it would
still be the very method we have proposed—concentration of
the available intensity information in the first PC, using this
result as indicator for backscattering homogeneity.

VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, an adaptive multilooking approach for airborne
single-pass multi-baseline InSAR data stacks has been pro-
posed. Its core ideas are the following: 1) the utilization of the
TV-filtered version of the first PC of the logarithmic amplitude
data stack as indicator for backscattering homogeneity and
2) a simple thresholding within a predefined search window for
the determination of pixel similarity. Due to these two features,
the method is both fast and efficient when applied to the esti-
mation of complex covariance matrices of InSAR data stacks.
Both filtering efficiency and detail preservation capability have
been evaluated in comparison to well-established multilooking
algorithms.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank H. Essen and T. Brehm of
the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar
Techniques as well as E. Meier and C. Magnard of Remote
Sensing Laboratories, University of Zurich for providing the
MEMPHIS test data.

Fig. 8. Detail preservation capabilities shown exemplarily at a building
facade containing an edge and a row of strong point scatterers. The left
column contains filtered intensities; the right column contains multilooked
phase differences. From top to bottom, single-look data and then the results of
boxcar mean filter (11 × 11; four images), DespecKS (11 × 11; four images),
NL-InSAR (21 × 21; two images), and PCA-based thresholding (11 × 11; four
images) are shown.
In summary, both the PCA-based thresholding approach
proposed in this paper and NL-InSAR provide very satisfying
results considering filtering efficiency and detail preservation.
As it has been noted before already, NL-InSAR, however, is
not designed for the determination of distinct homogeneous
neighborhoods, nor for the estimation of the whole complex
covariance matrices of multi-baseline InSAR stacks with more
than two SLC acquisitions. Although DespecKS is a statisti-
cally sound approach leading to convincing results for multi-
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Michael Schmitt (S’08) was born in Munich,
Germany, in 1984. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (Univ.)
degree in Geodesy and Geoinformation from the
Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Munich,
Germany, in 2009.
He is currently working toward the PhD degree
in airborne SAR interferometry using multi-baseline
and multi-aspect millimeter wave data at the De-
partment of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing,
TUM, where he has been a full-time research as-
sistant since May 2009. In addition to SAR inter-
ferometry, his main interests are (statistical) signal processing and parameter
estimation theory for imaging science problems.
Uwe Stilla (M’04–SM’09) was born in Cologne,
Germany, in 1957. He received a diploma
(Dipl.-Ing.) in electrical engineering from
Gesamthochschule Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany,
in 1980 and a diploma (Dipl.-Ing.) in biomedical
engineering and the Ph.D. degree in engineering,
with work in the field of pattern recognition, from
the University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, in
1987 and 1993, respectively.
From 1990 to 2004, he was with the Institute of
Optronics and Pattern Recognition (FGAN-FOM), a
German research establishment for defense-related studies. Since 2004, he has
been with Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Munich, Germany, where he
has been a Professor and the Head of the Department of Photogrammetry and
Remote Sensing and is currently the Director of the Institute of Photogramme-
try and Cartography. He is the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering
and Surveying and the Dean of Student Affairs of the bachelor’s and master’s
program “Geodesy and Geoinformation,” the international master’s programs
“Earth Oriented Space Science and Technology (ESPACE)” and “Cartography.”
Dr. Stilla is the Chair of the ISPRS working group III/VII “Pattern Analysis
in Remote Sensing,” a Principal Investigator of the International Graduate
School of Science and Engineering, the Vice President of the German Society
of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation (DGPF), a Member
of the Scientific Board of German Commission of Geodesy (DGK), and a
Member of Commission for Geodesy and Glaciology (KEG) of the Bavarian
Academy of Science and Humanities. He has been the Organizer and Chair
of the conferences “Photogrammetric Image Analysis (PIA),” “City Models,
Roads and Traffic (CMRT),” “GRSS/ISPRS Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event
(JURSE 2011),” “Earth Observation and Global Changes (EOGC 2011),” and
the “IEEE-GRSS Remote Sensing Summer School (RSSS12).” His research
focuses on image analysis in the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing.
He published more than 300 contributions.