Multistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a special mode of SAR system. The radar transmitter and receiver are located on different satellites, which brings many advantages, such as flexible baseline configuration, diverse receiving modes, and more detailed ground object classification information. The multistatic SAR has been widely used in interferometry, moving target detection, three-dimensional imaging, and other fields. The frequency offset between different oscillators will cause a modulation phase error in the signal. Therefore, phase synchronization is one of the most critical problems to be addressed in distributed SAR systems. This article reviews phase synchronization techniques, which are mainly divided into two methods: synchronization by direct microwave link and synchronization by a data-based estimation algorithm. Furthermore, the future development of synchronization technology is anticipated.

Interferometric phase filtering is a crucial step in multibaseline interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). Current multibaseline interferometric phase filtering methods mostly follow methods of single-baseline InSAR and do not bring its data superiority into full play. The joint filtering of multibaseline InSAR based on statistics is proposed in this paper. We study and analyze the fourth-order statistical quantity of interferometric phase: kurtosis. An empirical assumption that the kurtosis of interferograms with different baselines keeps constant is proposed and is named as the baseline-invariant property of kurtosis in this paper. Some numerical experiments and rational analyses confirm its validity and universality. The noise level estimation of nature images is extended to multibaseline InSAR by dint of the baseline-invariant property of kurtosis. A filtering method based on the non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST) and Wiener filter with estimated noise variance is proposed then. Firstly, multi-scaled and multi-directional coefficients of interferograms are obtained by NSST. Secondly, the noise variance is represented as the solution of a constrained non-convex optimization problem. A pre-thresholded Wiener filtering with estimated noise variance is employed for shrinking or zeroing NSST coefficients. Finally, the inverse NSST is utilized to obtain the filtered interferograms. Experiments on simulated and real data show that the proposed method has excellent comprehensive performance and is superior to conventional single-baseline filtering methods.