Reconstruction of Pseudo Quad-Pol Images from General Compact Polarimetric Data

Pseudo quad polarimetric (quad-pol) image reconstruction from the hybrid dual-pol (or compact polarimetric (CP)) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is an important technique for radar polarimetric applications. There are three key aspects concerned in the literature for the reconstruction methods, i.e., the scattering symmetric assumption, the reconstruction model, and the solving approach of the unknowns. Since CP measurements depend on the CP mode configurations, different reconstruction procedures were designed when the transmit wave varies, which means the reconstruction procedures were not unified. In this study, we propose a unified reconstruction framework for the general CP mode based on one of our previous work. Both the iterative and least squares (LS) error solving approaches are extended. Validation is carried out on polarimetric data sets from RADARSAT-2 (C-band) to compare the performances of the reconstruction models and CP modes.