Sample Extraction Bsaed on Helix Scattering for Polarimetric Sar Calibration

Polarimetric calibration (PolCAL) of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is a significant preprocessing for further applications. Since the reflection symmetry property of distributed objects can provide stable constraints for PolCAL. It is reasonable to extract these reference samples before calibration. The helix scattering generally appears in complex urban area and disappears for a natural scatterer, making it a good measure to extract distributed objects. In this paper, a novel technique that extracts reflecting symmetry samples is proposed by using helix scattering. The helix scattering information is calculated by Yamaguchi four-component decomposition algorithm. An adaptive threshold selection algorithm based on generalized Gaussian distribution is also utilized to scale the helix scattering components automatically, getting rid of the problem of various numerical range. The extracting results will be taken as PolCAL reference samples and the Quegan method are utilized to calibrate these PolSAR images. A C-band airborne PolSAR data was taken as examples to evaluate its ability in improving calibration precision. Traditional method i.e. extracting samples with span power was also evaluated as contrast experiment. The results showed that the samples extracting method based on helix scattering can improve the Polcal precision preferably.