10 Years of RADARSAT-2 Operations - Challenges and Improvements

Lambert, Casey; Chabot, M.; Rolland, P.

doi:10.2514/6.2018-2642

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Overall, the experimental results based on a three-hierarchy framework indicated that polarimetric distortions of most GF-3 PolSAR images were similar to ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2. ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2 have been widely applied in Earth observations for many years, and their quality is confirmed to meet the users’ requirements [11,12,15,33,37,43,44,45]. The crosstalk accuracy of RADARSAT-2 of −30 dB, the channel imbalance of 0.5 dB in amplitude, and 5 degrees in phase are reported [46].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meanwhile, in contrast to the PolSAR system of GF-3, another two space-borne polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) systems, ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 (ALOS-2) and RADARSAT-2, both have the sophisticated images quality subsystem (IQS) [5,6]. In addition, infrastructure and procedures designed to support the image quality and calibration operations, substantial and sustainable updates of calibration files, and annual status of the mission have been reported in both systems [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. Hence, it is essential to evaluate the quality of GF-3 polarimetric data and to achieve the similar quality compared with ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2

Wang

Jiao

Zeng

et al. 2019

Sensors

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GaoFen-3 (GF-3) is the first Chinese civilian multi-polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, launched on 10 August of 2016, and put into operation at the end of January 2017. The polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) system of GF-3 is able to provide quad-polarization (quad-pol) images in a variety of geophysical research and applications. However, this ability increases the complexity of maintaining image quality and calibration. As a result, to evaluate the quality of polarimetric data, polarimetric signatures are necessary to guarantee accuracy. Compared with some other operational space-borne PolSAR systems, such as ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 (ALOS-2) and RADARSAT-2, GF-3 has less reported calibration and image quality files, forcing users to validate the quality of polarimetric imagery of GF-3 before quantitative applications. In this study, without the validation data obtained from a calibration infrastructure, an innovative, three-hierarchy strategy was proposed to assess PolSAR data quality, in which the performance of GF-3 data was evaluated with ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2 data as references. Experimental results suggested that: (1) PolSAR data of GF-3 satisfied backscatter reciprocity, similar with that of RADARSAT-2; (2) most of the GF-3 PolSAR images had no signs of polarimetric distortion affecting decomposition, and the system of GF-3 may have been improved around May 2017; and (3) the classification accuracy of GF-3 varied from 75.0% to 91.4% because of changing image-acquiring situations. In conclusion, the proposed three-hierarchy approach has the ability to evaluate polarimetric performance. It proved that the residual polarimetric distortion of calibrated GF-3 PolSAR data remained at an insignificant level, with reference to that of ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2, and imposed no significant impact on the polarimetric decomposition components and classification accuracy.

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