cs.CVMar 22, 2026

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

Authors: Yijia Song, Juliet Biggs, Alin Achim, Robert Popescu, Simon Orrego, Nantheera Anantrasirichai

Organizations: Visual Information Laboratory, School of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK · COMET, School of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK · COMET, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, UK

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.

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