Comparative Analysis of Polarimetric SAR Calibration Methods

Abstract

In the diverse applications of polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems, it is a crucial to conduct polarimetric calibration, which aims to remove the radar system distortion effects prior to utilizing polarimetric SAR observations. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of different polarimetric calibration methods. Two widely used methods, the Van Zyl and Quegan methods, and one recently proposed method, such as the Villa method, have been selected among various calibration methods in literature. The selected methods have basic differences in their assumptions that are applied to the polarimetric system model. In order to evaluate the calibration performances under different system parameters and ground characteristics, comparative analysis of the calibration results were conducted on synthetic polarimetric SAR data and ALOS PALSAR quad-pol mode data. Based on the experimental results, the advantages and limitations of different methods were clarified, and a simple hybrid calibration method is presented to further improve the polarimetric calibration performance.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• radar polarimetry
• polarimetric calibration
• ALOS PALSAR