Applicability Analysis for Estimating and Validating Polarimetric Distortion Parameters Using Corner Reflectors for the N-Sar System

Abstract

A straightforward and efficient method is presented in detail to extract the relative polarimetric distortion parameters (PDPs) of polarimetric radar systems including polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR). By using one trihedral and two dihedrals and ignoring high order terms of channel crosstalk, the PDPs of a PolSAR system can be estimated straightforwardly and efficiently without any iterative procedure, complicated matrix operations, or assumptions of targets. Most importantly, the applicability issues are analyzed to obtain the accurate values of the PDPs. The sensitivity analysis of target orientation angle (TOA, a rotation about the radar line of sight) error is theoretically analyzed and experimentally studied. It appears that the impacts of the TOA error on the channel imbalances and channel crosstalk estimation are relatively independent. Based on simulation and practical N-SAR (a Chinese airborne SAR system) experiments, the results show that our proposed principle has an efficient performance.