PHASE (Persistent scatterer Highly Automated Suite for Environmental monitoring)

PHASE (Persistent scatterer Highly Automated Suite for Environmental monitoring) is a MATLAB-based software suite for the automatization of the InSAR PSI processing.
It is based on the well-known and widely used snap2stamps and StaMPS software, while coming with a set of new features and improvements.

SAR Satellites compatibility

• Sentinel-1 (from European Space Agency)
• COSMO-SkyMed (from Agenzia Spaziale Italiana)

Required Software

• SNAP
• MATLAB
• StaMPS

Required OS

• Linux: it is mandatory as StaMPS only works in this environment. The entire processing can be executed from start to end in it.
• Windows: only the preprocessing part can be executed in it.
• macOS: only the preprocessing part can be executed in it.

Installation and Setup

Note

A more detailed step-by-step guide is available in the provided user manual.
Before start using PHASE please read carefully the whole manual!

Preliminary Steps

1. Install SNAP Software
   Download and install SNAP from the European Space Agency website.
   
   Check that all the mandatory SNAP plugin modules are installed:

   • Microwave Toolbox Kit Module
   • Optical Toolbox Kit Module
   • SMOS-Box Kit Module
   • Radarsat Polarimetric Toolkit Module
   • ESA SNAPPY
   • EOMTBX
     

   After installing SNAP on your computer, you are suggested to review the parameters set in:

   • $HOME/snap/bin/gpt.vmoptions and modify the param
     • –Xmx 12G (according to your computer set up; i.e –Xmx 512M )
   • $HOME/snap/etc/snap.properties
     • #snap.home=
     • #snap.userdir=
     • snap.jai.tileCacheSize = 1024
     • snap.jai.defaultTileSize = 512

2. Install Required Python Modules:
   Install Python 2.7 or 3.x on your machine. Ensure you have the necessary libraries; if not, install them with:

   pip install os
   pip install sys
   pip install pathlib
   pip install shutil
   pip install glob
   pip install subprocess
   pip install shlex
   pip install time
   

3. Install xterm (only Linux Users):
   Install xterm by running sudo apt-get install xterm in the terminal.

4. Install StaMPS:
   Install StaMPS from the official GitHub repository.

   git clone https://github.com/dbekaert/StaMPS/releases/tag/v4.1-beta
   

5. PHASE suite

   • Download the PHASE_MANUAL and the PHASE_python2 or PHASE_python3 folder based on your python version.
   • Move or copy the downloaded folder (PHASE_pythonX) in your project folder, anywhere on your computer.
   • Exectute the PS_InSAR_Preprocessing.mlapp MATLAB application.
   • Tune all the configurable parameters across all the available tabs.
   • Once the preprocessing is complete, execute the StaMPS_Automate.mlapp MATLAB application (in Linux it will automatically open upon completion).

Processing Steps

1. Automated SAR Images Download:
   Download images from the Alaska SAR satellite facility for Sentinel-1 or manually from the Italian Space Agency website for COSMO-SkyMed.
2. Master Image Processing:
   Split and apply orbit correction. All the configurable parameters can be set through the GUI.
3. Slaves Pre-Processing:
   Steps include slaves preparation, splitting and orbit correction, coregistration and interferogram formation, StaMPS export, average scene intensity computation, and local incidence angle and coherence images computation. All the configurable parameters can be set through the GUI.
4. StaMPS Processing:
   Data preparation, parameter definition, and execution of StaMPS PS analysis. Displacement time series export in Excel format.

Possible Errors and Solutions

The procedure has been tested on SNAP 10.x, Python 2.7, Python 3.11, Ubuntu 20.04, Windows 10, macOS Sequoia (15.1), and MATLAB 2023b.

Tip

Refer to the manual for solutions to common errors encountered during the StaMPS processing.

Updates

• September 2024: added macOS compatibility to the preprocessing application.
• September 2024: improved master error handling.

Planned updates

• add the support to SAOCOM data processing.
• next major release will introduce the spatio-temporal time series processing with deterministic and stochastic methods. The same OS compatibility will be kept also for this new module.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Jose Manuel Delgado Blasco and Dr. Michael Foumelis for the snap2stamps¹ tool, and Prof. Andy Hooper for the StaMPS² development.

When using this software, please refer to:
Monti, R., & Rossi, L. (2025). PHASE: a Matlab-based software for the DInSAR PS processing. Geodesy and Cartography, 51(2), 88–99. https://doi.org/10.3846/gac.2025.21995

Footnotes

1. Foumelis, M., Delgado Blasco, J. M., Desnos, Y. L., Engdahl, M., Fernández, D., Veci, L. Lu, J. and Wong, C. “SNAP - StaMPS Integrated processing for Sentinel-1 Persistent Scatterer Interferometry”. In Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2018 IEEE International, IEEE.
   ↩

2. Hooper, A., A multi-temporal InSAR method incorporating both persistent scatterer and small baseline approaches, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L16,302, doi:10.1029/2008GL03465, 2008. ↩