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

Mansour, Islam, Fischer, Georg, Haensch, Ronny, Hajnsek, Irena

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

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. " W e leverage existing physics-based models and propose an integrated correction framework that combines parametric physical modeling with machine learning. W e 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 T anDEM-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.