Simulation of unpolarized scattering in synthetic aperture radar images

With fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR), images have been produced from copolarized, cross-polarized, and unpolarized (randomly polarized) scattered signals. Unpolarized scattering is simulated by a pair of equal-amplitude linearly polarized scatterers oriented orthogonally and located at the extremities of subpixels within a SAR resolution pixel. Calculations show that 10-30% of the returns from an arbitrary scene may be unpolarized.