Retrieval of DEM from SIR-C data in Kunlun Mountain, West China

Data from interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR) can provide three dimensional information of Earth surface by using the phase information. The authors present the processing results of SIR-C L-band data. The test site is Karakax, Xinjiang, China, which is very interesting from the seismic and geological point of view. An interactive INSAR data processor is developed for producing the topographic maps. First, the INSAR complex images are coregistered with the sub-pixel precision, the resulting interferogram is unwrapped by weighted least-squares algorithm. Ground control points are selected to estimate the INSAR parameters using least-squares algorithm, the topographic heights are derived from unwrapped phase with baseline parameters. Finally geocoding is applied to derived heights and SAR images. The rooted mean square error of the DEM is 16.14 meters.