Hybrid AI-Physical Modeling for Penetration Bias Correction in X-band InSAR DEMs: A Greenland Case Study

Abstract:Digital elevation models derived from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data over glacial and snow-covered regions often exhibit systematic elevation errors, commonly termed "penetration bias." We leverage existing physics-based models and propose an integrated correction framework that combines parametric physical modeling with machine learning. We evaluate the approach across three distinct training scenarios - each defined by a different set of acquisition parameters - to assess overall performance and the model's ability to generalize. Our experiments on Greenland's ice sheet using TanDEM-X data show that the proposed hybrid model corrections significantly reduce the mean and standard deviation of DEM errors compared to a purely physical modeling baseline. The hybrid framework also achieves significantly improved generalization than a pure ML approach when trained on data with limited diversity in acquisition parameters.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2504.08909 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2504.08909v2 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.08909 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPRW67362.2025.00205 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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