PS-ESD: Persistent Scatterer-Based Enhanced Spectral Diversity Approach for Time-Series Sentinel-1 TOPS Data Co-Registration

In Sentinel-1 terrain observation with progressive scan (TOPS) mode, this azimuth sweeping introduces an extra high-frequency Doppler term into the impulse response function, which requires the azimuth co-registration accuracy of 0.001 pixels to make the interferometric phase difference of adjacent bursts less than 3 degrees. The enhanced spectral diversity (ESD) and developing versions are usually used to correct such residual azimuth misregistration. However, in fast decorrelation scenario, the distributed scatterers (DSs)-based ESDs need to perform lots of complex data processing to reduce the decorrelation impact on high-precision co-registration, including multilooking, spatial filtering, network construction, and least square adjustment. The DS-based co-registration methods are complicated and inefficient, which is not suitable for big synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data processing. Therefore, this letter proposes a persistent scatterers-based ESD (PS-ESD): to estimate the amplitude dispersion index (ADI) with double samples over the burst overlap regions and select the satisfied PS pixels to compute the double differential phase under the one-master interferometric framework for correcting the time-series azimuth shifts. Based on the Sentinel-1 TOPS SAR data over the mountainous area in Three Gorges, China, experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed PS-ESD can achieve higher co-registration accuracy and faster convergence rate, especially in the case of dynamic co-registration of newly added TOPS images.