Polarimetric phase gradient autofocus

Abstract

In the past decade the use of fully polarimetric SAR (polSAR) systems has increased significantly due to their effectiveness in target classification and detection applications. While polSAR imagery has been extensively used to distinguish between different scattering mechanisms in a scene, there has been a lack of research in the exploitation of polarimetry to assist in image formation and in particular autofocus for fine resolution SAR. In this paper an extension of the phase gradient algorithm (PGA) for polSAR imaging is proposed and its effectiveness is tested on simulated and real data.