A Method for Calibration of Airborne Polarimetric SAR

Due to the channels of Polarimetric SAR system are not always perfectly isolated and do not have identical properties, thus the measurements are contaminated. Therefore, calibration is necessary to get an accureate estimate from the distorted measurement. This paper describes a method for Calibration of X-band airborne polarimetric SAR system. The method performs radiometric and phase calibration using both point targets and distributed targets, estimates the crosstalk between the H-polarization and V-polarization channels using Ainsworth parameter estimation. Flight tests have proved the validity of the proposed method.