Joint Filtering of SAR Interferometric and Amplitude Data in Urban Areas by TV Minimization

This paper investigates the use of a popular regularization model, the total variation minimization (TV), to filter SAR interferometric images (amplitude and phase data). This model is extensively used for its property of preserving edges and is therefore well adapted for urban areas. Using a TV model adapted to multi-dimensional data, we propose to do a joint filtering of phase and amplitude images. Due to the many local minima, the minimization of such a model is hard to perform. A new fast approximate discrete algorithm is presented. The filtering is applied in the framework of 3D reconstruction. Results on real images are presented.