Quality assessment of interferometric SAR DEMs

A new interferometric SAR (InSAR) procedure for DEM generation was employed to generate different DEMs from ERS SAR image pairs. The procedure was validated comparing the InSAR DEMs with a suited reference DEM. In the first part of the paper the principal features of the procedure are briefly summarised. The second part is focused on the quality assessment of the InSAR DEMs. They cover the same test area and come from one ascending SAR image pair, one descending pair and from the fusion of data coming from ascending and descending images. The analysis includes the influence of the SAR image coherence, the degradation of the DEM quality related to the terrain topography and the artefacts due to atmospheric effects.