From Maxwell's Equations to Polarimetric SAR Images: A Simulation Approach

A new electromagnetic approach for the simulation of polarimetric SAR images is proposed. It starts from Maxwell's equations, employs the spectral domain full-wave technique, the moment method, and the stationary phase method to compute the far electromagnetic fields scattered by multilayer structures. A multilayer structure is located at each selected position of a regular rectangular grid of coordinates, which defines the scene area under imaging. The grid is determined taking into account the elementary scatter size and SAR operational parameters, such as spatial resolution, pixel spacing, look angle and platform altitude. A two-dimensional separable “sinc” function to represent the SAR spread point function is also considered. Multifrequency sets of single-look polarimetric SAR images are generated, in L-, C- and X-bands and the images are evaluated using several measurements commonly employed in SAR data analysis. The evaluation shows that the proposed simulation process is working properly, since the obtained results are in accordance with those presented in the literature. Therefore, this new approach becomes suitable for carrying out theoretical and practical studies using polarimetric SAR images.