English

UnwrapDiff: A Conditional Diffusion Model for InSAR Phase Unwrapping

Geophysics 2026-01-18 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Phase unwrapping is a fundamental problem in InSAR data processing, supporting geophysical applications such as deformation monitoring and hazard assessment. Its reliability is limited by noise and decorrelation in radar acquisitions, which makes accurate reconstruction of the deformation signal challenging. We propose a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM)-based framework for InSAR phase unwrapping, UnwrapDiff, in which the output of the traditional minimum cost flow algorithm (SNAPHU) is incorporated as conditional guidance. To evaluate robustness, we construct a synthetic dataset that incorporates atmospheric effects and diverse noise patterns, representative of realistic InSAR observations. Experiments show that the proposed model leverages the conditional prior while reducing the effect of diverse noise patterns, achieving on average a 10.11\% reduction in NRMSE compared to SNAPHU. It also achieves better reconstruction quality in difficult cases such as dyke intrusions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.04749,
  title  = {UnwrapDiff: A Conditional Diffusion Model for InSAR Phase Unwrapping},
  author = {Yijia Song and Juliet Biggs and Alin Achim and Robert Popescu and Simon Orrego and Nantheera Anantrasirichai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.04749},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:09:24.485Z