Processing, radiometric correction, autofocus and polarimetric classification of circular SAR data.

• Autor(a) principal: Muriel Aline Pinheiro
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações do ITA
• Texto Completo: http://www.bd.bibl.ita.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=1083
• topic: Radar de abertura sintética; Aquisição de dados; Polarização circular; Processamento de imagens; Correção radiométrica; Polarimetria; Classificação de padrões; Teoria de filtragem; Telecomunicações; Engenharia eletrônica

The demand for high resolution SAR systems and also for imaging techniques to retrieve scene information on the third dimension have stimulated the development of new acquisition modes and processing approaches. This work studies one of the newest SAR acquisition modes being used, namely the Circular SAR, in which the platform follows a non-linear circular trajectory. A brief introduction of the acquisition geometry is present along with the advantages of this acquisition mode, such as the volumetric reconstruction capability, higher resolutions and the possibility to retrieve target information from a wider range of observation angles. To deal with the non-linearity of trajectory, a processing approach using the time domain back-projection algorithm is suggested to focus and radiometric correct the images, taking into account the antenna patterns and loss due to propagation. An existing autofocus approach to correct motion errors is validated for the circular SAR context and a new frequency domain approach is proposed. Once the images are processed and calibrated, a polarimetric analysis is presented. In this context, a new polarimetric classification methodology is proposed for the particular geometry under consideration. The method uses the H- plane and the information of the first eigenvalue to classify small sub-apertures of the circular trajectory and finally classify the entire 360 circular aperture. Using information of all sub-apertures it is possible to preserve information of directional targets and diminish the effects caused by topography defocusing on the classification. To obtain speckle reduction improving the classification algorithm a Lee adaptive filter is implemented. The processing calibration approaches and the classification methodology are validated with circular SAR real data acquired with the SAR systems from the German Aerospace Center (DLR).