When Less Is More: Simplicity Beats Complexity for Physics-Constrained InSAR Phase Unwrapping
Operational phase unwrapping is the primary computational bottleneck in InSAR-based volcanic and seismic monitoring. We challenge the industry trend of adopting high-complexity computer vision architectures, such as attention mechanisms, without validating their suitability for physics-constrained geophysical regression. We present the first large-scale architectural ablation study on a global LiCSAR benchmark (20 frames, 39,724 patches, 651M pixels). Our results reveal a significant "complexity penalty": a vanilla U-Net (7.76M parameters) achieves $R^2=0.834$ and RMSE $= 1.01$ cm, outperforming 11.37M-parameter attention-based models by 34% in $R^2$ and 51% in RMSE. Power Spectral Densit...
| Authors | Prabhjot Singh, Manmeet Singh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 28 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 April 2026 |
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