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

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 variet...

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Autores principales: Wang, Zezhong, Jiao, Jian, Zeng, Qiming, Liu, Junyi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480310/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30934769
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19071493
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author Wang, Zezhong
Jiao, Jian
Zeng, Qiming
Liu, Junyi
author_facet Wang, Zezhong
Jiao, Jian
Zeng, Qiming
Liu, Junyi
author_sort Wang, Zezhong
collection PubMed
description 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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spelling pubmed-64803102019-04-29 A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2 Wang, Zezhong Jiao, Jian Zeng, Qiming Liu, Junyi Sensors (Basel) Article 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. MDPI 2019-03-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6480310/ /pubmed/30934769 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19071493 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Wang, Zezhong
Jiao, Jian
Zeng, Qiming
Liu, Junyi
A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2
title A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2
title_full A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2
title_fullStr A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2
title_full_unstemmed A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2
title_short A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2
title_sort three-hierarchy evaluation of polarimetric performance of gf-3, compared with alos-2/palsar-2 and radarsat-2
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480310/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30934769
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19071493
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