NBDNet: A Self-Supervised CNN-Based Method for InSAR Phase and Coherence Estimation

Abstract

Phase denoising constitutes a critical component of the synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) processing chain, where noise suppression and detail preservation are two mutually constraining objectives. Recently, deep learning has attracted considerable interest due to its promising performance in the field of image denoising. In this paper, a Neighbor2Neighbor denoising network (NBDNet) is proposed, which is capable of simultaneously estimating phase and coherence in both single-look and multi-look cases. Specifically, repeat-pass PALSAR real interferograms encompassing a diverse range of coherence, fringe density, and terrain features are used as the training dataset, and the novel Neighbor2Neighbor self-supervised training framework is leveraged. The Neighbor2Neighbor framework eliminates the necessity of noise-free labels, simplifying the training process. Furthermore, rich features can be learned directly from real interferograms. In order to validate the denoising capability and generalization ability of the proposed NBDNet, simulated data, repeat-pass data from Sentinel-1 Interferometric Wide (IW) swath mode, and single-pass data from Hongtu-1 stripmap mode are used for phase denoising experiments. The results demonstrate that NBDNet performs well in terms of noise suppression, detail preservation and computation efficiency, validating its potential for high-precision and high-resolution topography reconstruction.

Keywords

• convolutional neural network (CNN)
• Neighbor2Neighbor
• phase denoising
• self-supervised training
• synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR)