Data volume reduction for imaging radar polarimeter

The authors derive an algorithm to reduce required storage space for multipolarimetric synthetic aperture radar data which preserves signal integrity. The data reduction operation reduces the required storage by 12.8. The image synthesis process applied to a reduced data set can be applied to a standard image in two minutes on a VAX 785 when the compressed data format is used. This is ten times faster than image synthesis of the corresponding original data, due to the smaller volume of the compressed data (10 Mb compared with 128 Mb per image). The errors introduced in the output images are on the order of 10/sup -3/. Thus, operations with polarimetric data are greatly facilitated and are now within reach of small research groups.<>