Comparing Target Detection Performance Between Quad-, Compact- and Dual-Polarimetric SAR Systems

This paper established a unified framework to compare the capabilities of different polarimetric SAR systems in target detection based on polarimetric covariance matrix. The framework contains two different strategies. The first is based on the original polarimetric matrix and the second is based on the main scattering matrix. An improved algorithm is proposed based on the second strategy. GF-3 quad-polarimetric data is used to compare the performance between different algorithms, the results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain the highest signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR). The performance of different polarimetric systems is further compared, and the results show that the quad-polarimetric (QP) performs best, compact-polarimetric (CP) performance is similar to QP, and dual-polarimetric (DP) performs worst.