Synthesis of complex-valued InSAR data with a multi-task convolutional neural network

Simulated remote sensing images bear great potential for many applications in the field of Earth observation. They can be used as controlled testbed for the development of signal and image processing algorithms or can provide a means to get an impression of the potential of new sensor concepts. With the rise of deep learning, the synthesis of artificial remote sensing images by means of deep neural networks has become a hot research topic. While the generation of optical data is relatively straightforward, as it can rely on the use of established models from the computer vision community, the generation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data until now is still largely restricted to intensity images since the processing of complex-valued numbers by conventional neural networks poses significant challenges. With this work, we propose to circumvent these challenges by decomposing SAR interferograms into real-valued components. These components are then simultaneously synthesized by different branches of a multi-branch encoder–decoder network architecture. In the end, these real-valued components can be combined again into the final, complex-valued interferogram. Moreover, the effect of speckle and interferometric phase noise is replicated and applied to the synthesized interferometric data. Experimental results on both medium-resolution C-band repeat-pass SAR data and high-resolution X-band single-pass SAR data, demonstrate the general feasibility of the approach. • Complex-valued SAR interferograms are simulated with deep learning. • Complex-valued target data is split into real-valued components. • Multitask learning is used to synthesize real-valued components. • Approach combines physical model and deep learning.