Radiometric Terrain Correction Method Based on RPC Model for Polarimetric SAR Data

Abstract

Radiometric terrain correction (RTC) is an important preprocessing step for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data application in mountainous areas. At present, the RTC processing of SAR depends on the Range Doppler (RD) positioning model. However, the solution of this model has a high threshold for ordinary remote sensing technicians. To solve this problem, we propose an RTC method based on the rational polynomial coefficient (RPC) model, which is widely used in optical remote sensing and is simpler and more practical than the RD model. China’s GF-3 polarimetric SAR data were used to verify the proposed method. The experimental results showed that the RTC method based on RPC is effective and can achieve better correction effects on the premise of reducing the complexity of the algorithm. The correction effect based on the RPC model can be similar to that based on the RD model. The proposed approach can realize the correction of 4~5 dB terrain radiation distortion to a 0.5 dB level.