Study on the impact of Polarimetric calibration errors on terrain classification with PolInSAR

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Interferometry (PolInSAR) becomes a hot topic in SAR application areas, such as terrain classification. However, the system parameter design is mostly based on traditional Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) or interferometric SAR (InSAR) methods. The accuracy of polarimetric calibration is the major factor for the PolInSAR system design, so it is necessary to analyze the affect of polarimatric calibration errors on terrain classification accuracy. In this paper, error transfer link of typical classification algorithm is investigated, then, the minimum requirements on polarimetric distortions including channel imbalance and crosstalk are investigated for terrain classification application for the first time. The result is verified by E-SAR datasets, which can provide the important theoretical basis and reference for quantitative calibration requirements of classification accuracy.