Analysis of orientation angle shifts on the polarimetric data using RadarSAT2

The polarimetric orientation angle (POA) shifts can be compensated by the rotation about the line of sight based on the derived orientation angle. Based on uncompensated data, surface parameter estimation may produce incorrect results, and model-based target decompositions may generate erroneous scattering characteristics that could be misinterpreted. Consequently, it is desirable to compensate the data for the orientation effect before applying scattering model based decompositions for various applications. In this paper, we investigate the compensation effect on the elements of the linear, circular and coherency matrices. For our research work, we adopt the circular polarization techniques for OA compensation, because its effectiveness has been demonstrated and verified by comparison with interferometric SAR measurements. We illustrate our results by using the polarimetric SAR images acquired in Algiers by the RadarSAT2 (FQ19) in C-band.