1. ON THE RECONSTRUCTION OF QUAD-POL SAR DATA
FROM COMPACT POLARIMETRY DATA FOR OCEAN
TARGET DETECTION
ABSTRACT:
Circular-transmit/linear-receive compact polarimetry synthetic aperture radar systems
combine coherent dual polarization with wide-swath imaging. The polarization information
in these data may be represented as a Stokes vector, or one can reconstruct several quad
polarized covariance elements. Two reconstruction algorithms have been published in the
literature: one by Souyris and a refined algorithm by Nord We investigated the application of
these two algorithms for reconstructing ocean clutter for the purpose of detecting targets. We
tested the assumptions underlying these algorithms and found that they were not valid for
ocean scenes. We present a simple empirical reconstruction model whose reconstruction and
target detection performance is superior to the two published algorithms.