A Quality Assessment Method Based on Common Distributed Targets for GF-3 Polarimetric SAR Data

Sha Jiang; Xiaolan Qiu; Bing Han; Wenlong Hu

doi:10.3390/s18030807

A Quality Assessment Method Based on Common Distributed Targets for GF-3 Polarimetric SAR Data

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Mar 7;18(3):807. doi: 10.3390/s18030807.

Authors

Sha Jiang^{1

2}, Xiaolan Qiu³, Bing Han⁴, Wenlong Hu⁵

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. jiangsha15@mails.ucas.ac.cn.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. jiangsha15@mails.ucas.ac.cn.
³ Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. xlqiu@mail.ie.ac.cn.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. han_bing@mail.ie.ac.cn.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. wlhu@mail.ie.ac.cn.

Abstract

The GaoFen-3 (GF-3) satellite, launched on 10 August 2016, is the first C-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) satellite in China. The PolSAR system of GF-3 can collect a significant wealth of information for geophysical research and applications. Being used for related applications, GF-3 PolSAR images must be of good quality. It is necessary to evaluate the quality of polarimetric data and achieve the normalized quality monitoring during 8-year designed life of GF-3. In this study, a new quality assessment method of PolSAR data based on common distributed targets is proposed, and the performance of the method is analyzed by simulations and GF-3 experiments. We evaluate the quality of GF-3 PolSAR data by this method. Results suggest that GF-3 antenna is highly isolated, and the quality of calibrated data satisfies the requests of quantitative applications.

Keywords: GF-3 satellite; PolSAR; channel imbalance; crosstalk; quality assessment.