AVERAGING-AREA-CONTRAINED ADAPTIVE INTERFEROMETRIC FILTER THAT OPTIMIZES COMBINED COHERENT AND NONCOHERENT AVERAGING

A family of multiple scale adaptive filters and filtering methods that automatically adapt their impulse response width to local data characteristics, optimizing the accuracy, yield, and/or detail of interferometric measurements. A prefilter with fixed impulse response width is applied to a complex interferogram. The phase of the prefiltered complex interferogram is unwrapped. Then, a weighted combination of the phase-unwrapped, fixed-filtered interferograms is computed using a data-dependent criterion function. The resulting weighting function at each resolution element is typically a nonlinear function of interferogram magnitude and coherence for each fixed filter output at that resolution element.