A MODIFIED METHOD FOR POLARIMETRIC SAR CALIBRATION ALGORITHM

Abstract. Present fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems often update calibration techniques to further enhance the accuracy to the polarimetric data. In this paper, we propose a modified method to estimate the value of crosstalk based on the corrected observed value. Since Ainsworth calibration algorithm firstly set the value of k to be one. And the value of k relates to the copolarization channel imbalance .We consider the effects of value of k and analyze it. Through comparison to crosstalk results between the stimulated parameters and the estimated parameters, we assume high co-polarization channel imbalance will be obviously to affect crosstalk results. Then, used covariance observation value of the initial value of k rewrites the model to solve related parameters. And crosstalk parameter is calculated by the same iterative method. To verify the effect of the modified calibration method, this letter compares the accuracy of the two methods using the simulated polarimetric SAR data and Chinese airborne X-band polarimetric SAR data. The results confirm that the modified method tends to get more accurate crosstalk results.