English

An InSAR Phase Unwrapping Framework for Large-scale and Complex Events

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence Geophysics

Abstract

Phase unwrapping remains a critical and challenging problem in InSAR processing, particularly in scenarios involving complex deformation patterns. In earthquake-related deformation, shallow sources can generate surface-breaking faults and abrupt displacement discontinuities, which severely disrupt phase continuity and often cause conventional unwrapping algorithms to fail. Another limitation of existing learning-based unwrapping methods is their reliance on fixed and relatively small input sizes, while real InSAR interferograms are typically large-scale and spatially heterogeneous. This mismatch restricts the applicability of many neural network approaches to real-world data. In this work, we present a phase unwrapping framework based on a diffusion model, developed to process large-scale interferograms and to address phase discontinuities caused by deformation. By leveraging a diffusion model architecture, the proposed method can recover physically consistent unwrapped phase fields even in the presence of fault-related phase jumps. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the method effectively addresses discontinuities associated with near-surface deformation and scales well to large InSAR images, offering a practical alternative to manual unwrapping in challenging scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.21378,
  title  = {An InSAR Phase Unwrapping Framework for Large-scale and Complex Events},
  author = {Yijia Song and Juliet Biggs and Alin Achim and Robert Popescu and Simon Orrego and Nantheera Anantrasirichai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21378},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:32:26.138Z