In this study, an algorithm combining feature tracking and maximum cross-correlation (FT-MCC) for the extraction of sea ice motion (SIM) vectors was applied to Gaofen-3 (GF-3) imagery, filling the gap of SIM extraction using GF-3 imagery. The locally consistent (LC) flow field filtering method is proposed to replace the filtering method based on the correlation coefficient threshold in FT-MCC to improve filtering effectiveness of SIM results extracted by FT-MCC. A comparison of the probability density distributions (PDDs) of the correlation coefficients of SIM vectors extracted by FT-MCC from images with different resolutions revealed high reliability for SIM vectors extracted for images with an 80 m spatial resolution. A comparison of the PDDs of the correlation coefficients of SIM vectors obtained from images with different polarization modes showed more reliable SIM vectors were extracted from vertical transmit horizontal receive (VH) polarization images than from corresponding vertical transmit vertical receive (VV) polarization images. The SIM vectors extracted from GF-3 images by two methods (FT(A-KAZE)-MCC and FT(ORB)-MCC) derived from the FT-MCC algorithm were highly consistent in terms of accuracy and reliability. SIM vectors extracted manually and from Sentinel-1 images were used as reference data to verify the SIM results extracted from GF-3 images, for which the uncertainties in the magnitude and direction of the extracted SIM vectors were found to be 0.119 cm/s-0.287 cm/s (103 m/d-248 m/d) and 4.119°-5.930°, respectively.
The ionospheric error can significantly affect the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals, particularly in the case of L band and lower frequency SAR systems. The ionospheric distortions are mixed with terrain and ground deformation signals, lowering the precision of the interferometric measurements. Moreover, it is often difficult to detect the small-scale ionospheric structure due to its rapid changes and may have more influence on ionospheric phase compensation for InSAR measurements. In this paper, we present a Faraday rotation (FR) inversion method and corresponding procedure to compensate the ionospheric error for SAR interferograms and to detect the variations of small-scale ionospheric disturbances. This method retrieves the absolute total electron content (TEC) based on the FR estimation and corrects the ionospheric error for synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) measurements by transforming the differential TEC into the ionospheric phase. In two selected study cases, located in high latitude and equatorial regions where ionospheric disturbances occur frequently, we test the method using the Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) full-polarimetric SAR images. Our results show that the proposed procedure can effectively compensate the ionospheric phase. In order to validate the results, we present the results of ionospheric phase compensation based on the split-spectrum method as a comparison to the proposed method. To analyze the ability of our proposed method in detecting small-scale ionospheric disturbances, TEC derived from FR estimation are also compared with those derived from the global ionosphere maps (GIM). Our research provides a robust choice for the correction of ionospheric error in SAR interferograms. It also provides a powerful tool to measure small-scale ionospheric structure.
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