A comparison between different polarimetric measurement schemes

The usefulness of polarization information in remote sensing applications has been clearly demonstrated in the last two decades. Land covers and meteorological targets are complex and their backscatter returns are time varying. Their polarimetric characteristics should be determined in terms of second order statistics of scattering matrix elements. These are contained. in the polarimetric covariance matrix. Estimation of polarimetric covariance matrix elements has been addressed by different authors based on different scattering matrix measurement methods. The most widely used and implemented method consists in the alternate transmission of two orthogonal polarizations while. receiving with both. Recently, a method that considers simultaneous transmission of two orthogonal polarizations, which are phase coded with orthogonal signals, has been proposed. Another method, specifically developed to obtain the polarimetric covariance matrix, is based on transmitting three different polarizations and receiving their corresponding co-polar and cross-polar counterparts. Different data sets result from each measurement technique and different estimators of polarimetric covariance matrix elements have been developed for the different data sets available. These various methods are investigated in here. Based on simulated data the performance of the different estimators under different working conditions are analyzed. Effects on the estimators of operation frequency, pulse repetition frequency (PRF) and temporal properties of targets are discussed.