Study on Extraction of the Ground Information from Quad-polarization Data

Abstract

SIR\|C is the first spaceborne imaging Radar system with multi\|wavelength and quad\|polarization developed by joint effort of U.S, Italy and Germany. Polarization SAR measures the scattering matrix of each pixel on ground and synthesizes the image at given orientation and ellipticity angle, including linear and elliptical polarization. It has many advantages over single or multi\|polarization SAR in detecting objects, identifying targets and extracting texture. Based on SIR\|C data of Hetian prefecture in Xinjiang of China, this paper presents the basic principle of polarization synthesis and the processing flow of SIR\|C data, analyses the polarization signal of four typical ground objects and makes experiment of extraction of quad\|polarization SAR data using supervised classification method. The experimental result shows that the polarization signal of ground objects vary greatly with the characteristics of geometry and distribution of the objects, on which quad\|polarization SAR data can synthesize certain images to sharpen the contrast of the objects to achieve better classification result and more effectively extract the information. So quad\|polarization has wide applications in survey of land cover and inversly extracting parameters of ground objects.