Effects of Motion Compensation Residual Error and Polarization Distortion on UAV-Borne PolInSAR

Polarimetric Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolInSAR) can improve interferometric coherence and phase quality, which has good application potential. With the development of the Mini-SAR system, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle borne (UAV-borne) PolInSAR systems became a reality. However, UAV-borne PolInSAR is easily affected by air currents and other factors, which may cause large motion errors and polarization distortion inevitably exists. However, there are few pieces of research which are about motion compensation residual error (MCRE) and polarization distortion effects on PolInSAR. Though the effects of MCRE on Interferometric SAR (InSAR) and polarization distortion on PolInSAR were studied, respectively, these two parts are independently modeled and analyzed. In this paper, a model that simultaneously considers the effects of these two kinds of errors is proposed, and simulation results are given to validate the model. Then, a quantitative analysis based on a real Quadcopter UAV PolInSAR system is performed according to the model, which is valuable for system design and practical application of the UAV-borne PolInSAR system.