NESZ Estimation and Calibration for Gaofen-3 Polarimetric Products by the Minimum Noise Envelope Estimator

Abstract

The Chinese Gaofen-3 satellite currently provides us with an open way to access fully polarimetric data in the C-band frequency. The noise equivalent sigma zero (NESZ) is a crucial factor when calibrating the additive noise in radar imagery. For most radar sensors, NESZ coefficients are stored in header files, but these are not provided for the Gaofen-3 products. The minimum eigenvalue estimator (MEE) and maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) are the two most common techniques used to derive the NESZ from polarimetric imagery. Nevertheless, the bias has been found to be higher than 5 dB compared with the noise measurement circuit (NMC) of the hardware. In this article, we propose a minimum noise envelope estimator (MNEE) for the robust estimation of the Gaofen-3 NESZ. In this article, we carried out an in-depth investigation to analyze the error sources of the MEE and MLE techniques. Based on our analysis, the MNEE framework requires the use of the ocean surface as a reference, and MNEE is combined with the minimum operation to suppress overestimation. In the experimental section, we describe how we validated the proposed algorithm with Radarsat-2 images, and the MNEE is treated as a tool to estimate the NESZ of Gaofen-3 polarimetric products. We found that the Gaofen-3 NESZ is generally less than -20 dB, which satisfies the design specification. The range-dependent NESZ coefficients are provided here to allow convenient noise correction for Gaofen-3 data users.