Comparison of algorithms for co-registration of satellite synthetic aperture radar images

The co-registration of complex images is one of the vital procedures in data reduction of satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry that can be applied to extract either ground elevations or displacements.The imperfect coregistration can degrade the quality of interferogram fringes,and thus lowering the accuracy of elevations or displacements derived interferometrically.By using a pair of SAR images collected over Shanghai through the tandem mode of ERS1 and ERS2, this paper carries out computations using three co-registration algorithms to compare their performances on quality and computation cost in co-registration.Some findings have been obtained from the experiments. It is found that CCM has the best performance in terms of coregistration quality, and MAF ranks the second. However, MSM is superior to MAF when the signal noise ratio (SNR) is low in the interferometric dataset. In terms of computational efficiency, MAF takes the least time.