Abstract
In this article, we devise a polarimetric calibration method utilizing only three types of calibration targets, i.e., trihedral, dihedral, and a 22.5°-rotated dihedral corner reflectors and requiring no assumptions on the scene statistics. The influence of the roll angle in a 22.5°-rotated dihedral corner reflector is assessed by a full-wave numerical simulation. The effectiveness and accuracy of the method are verified with a ground-based synthetic aperture radar system and an airborne L-band Pi-SAR data. We demonstrate that an amplitude error as low as 0.5 dB and a phase error within 3° can be achieved, showing an excellent agreement between the theoretical and calibrated polarimetric signatures for the reference targets. We further exploit the calibration on the Pauli decomposition, Yamaguchi four-component decomposition, and the estimation of the polarimetric parameters derived from target scattering vector method decomposition to show the superior performance of the devised calibration method.
Highlights
F ULLY polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) has been widely applied in a wide range of terrain classification, geophysical parameter retrieval, and target detection, to name a few [1], [2]
Polarimetric calibration is devised to correct the polarization distortions caused by an imperfect radar system, which are primarily due to a nonideal channel imbalance and polarization cross-talk errors between the transmitter and receiver [4]
Given the abovementioned development of the calibration techniques, in this article, we present a general polarimetric calibration technique using hybrid corner reflectors (CRs), requiring only one trihedral and two dihedral CRs with different rotation angles for polarimetric calibration
Summary
F ULLY polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) has been widely applied in a wide range of terrain classification, geophysical parameter retrieval, and target detection, to name a few [1], [2]. Touzi and Shimada [20] used the distributed targets to correct the system gain and channel imbalance These authors used the target tilt angles of significant symmetric scattering for the calibration and validation of Phased Array type L-band SAR (PALSAR) polarimetric modes. WANG et al.: PERFORMANCE OF SAR POLARIMETRIC CALIBRATION USING HYBRID CORNER REFLECTORS where Smand St denote the measured and theoretical 2×2 scattering matrices, respectively; Tand R represent the transmitting and receiving distortion matrices, respectively, and N accounts for random noise. Their expressions are as follows: Fig. 1.
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