In this paper, a method is proposed to improve the interferometric phase quality, based on fusing data from different polarimetric channels. Since lower amplitude implies less reliable phase in general, the phase quality of polarimetric interferometric data can be improved by seeking optimal fusion of data from different polarizations to maximize the resulting amplitude. In the proposed approach, for each pixel, two coherent polarimetric scattering vectors are synchronously projected onto a same optimum direction, maximizing the lower amplitude of the two projections. In the single-look case, the fused phase is equivalent to the weighted average of phases in all polarimetric channels. It provides a good physical explanation of the proposed approach. Without any filtering, the phase noise and the number of residue points are significantly reduced, and the interferometric phase quality is greatly improved. It is a useful tool to preprocess the phase ahead of phase unwrapping. The Cloude's coherence optimization method is used for a comparison. Using the data collected by SIR-C/X-SAR, the authors demonstrate the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed approach.
Keywords: Polarimetric SAR interferometry; phase improvement.