RFI Artefacts Detection in Sentinel-1 Level-1 SLC Data Based On Image Processing Techniques

Abstract

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data are often contaminated by Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI) artefacts that make processing them more challenging. Therefore, easy to implement techniques for artefacts recognition have the potential to support the automatic Permanent Scatterers InSAR (PSInSAR) processing workflow during which faulty input data can lead to misinterpretation of the final outcomes. To address this issue, an efficient methodology was developed to mark images with RFI artefacts and as a consequence remove them from the stack of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images required in the PSInSAR processing workflow to calculate the ground displacements. Techniques presented in this paper for the purpose of RFI detection are based on image processing methods with the use of feature extraction involving pixel convolution, thresholding and nearest neighbor structure filtering. As the reference classifier, a convolutional neural network was used.