Abstract:

Compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a recently developed special SAR system. In order to reduce the raw data rate, a data compression has to be performed, and the polarimetric information of SAR measurement will be deteriorated by compression errors. Three widelyused raw data compression methods, including 4 bit quantization, 8∶3 block adaptive quantization (BAQ) and 8∶4 BAQ, are evaluated through simulated data under different signaltoclutter ratio (SCR) conditions. The sensitivities of different CP SAR working modes to data compression noises are analyzed. A metric is defined to measure the polarization quality of CP SAR data. Simulation results show that the 8∶4 BAQ performs the best and the 8∶3 BAQ performs the worst on condition that the SCR is much higher than 40 dB, and that the three compression methods have similar performances on condition of SCR that is lower than 40 dB. The sensitivity of the π/4 mode to data compression noises is larger than that of both the CTLR mode and the DCP mode.