Interferometric Processing of SLC Sentinel-1 TOPS Data

InSAR processing usually involves two successive steps: focusing and interferometry. Most public-domain InSAR processing toolboxes are capable of performing both operations with data acquired in the standard Stripmap mode, starting from raw SAR data (level 0). However, the focusing of burst-mode data, such as TOPS and ScanSAR, requires substantial modifications to standard focusing methods due to the particular spectral properties of these data. Anticipating on this potential difficulty for non-expert users, the European Space Agency has chosen to release Sentinel-1 TOPS data in a Single Look Complex format (level 1). The data are already focused using state-of-the-art processing techniques, with phase information preserved. Even so, the focusing method introduces an additional quadratic phase term in the azimuth direction. In case of a small misregistration error between a pair of images, this residual term leads to steep phase ramps in azimuth that are superimposed on the desired interferometric phase. Therefore, this quadratic phase term needs to be removed from the SLC data prior to interferogram calculation. Here, a pre-processing method allowing for compensating this phase term and simply feeding the corrected SLC data into a standard InSAR processing chain is described. The method consists of three steps. The first step uses the metadata in order to reconstruct a continuous image in the azimuth direction, accounting for the small overlap between adjacent bursts (“stitching”). In the second step, multiplication of the images by an appropriate phase screen is performed so as to cancel the azimuthal quadratic phase term (“deramping”). The deramping operation uses the metadata, as well as the azimuth time lag between the images deduced from sub-pixel image correlation, in order to determine small misregistration errors. Misregistration errors are compensated using a simple affine relation deduced from least-square fitting of the azimuth offsets. Following this second step, the azimuth phase ramps are significantly reduced in the corrected interferogram. The third step consists in refining the affine coefficients that account for the misregistration error. The refinement is achieved by differencing the backwardand forward-looking interferograms, exploiting the spectral diversity in burst overlap regions (“spectral diversity”). This final step makes it possible to remove residual phase jumps across burst boundaries with the desired level of accuracy.