Three-stage terrain correction method for polarimetric SAR data

The radiometric quality of polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) image is affected by terrain undulations due to 1) the variation of effective scattering area, 2) the variation of scattering mechanisms, and 3) the variation of polarization states. This paper proposed a three-stage terrain correction method of PolSAR data for the impact of above three aspects. PALSAR-2 PolSAR data and LiDAR forest AGB data are used to illustrate the method. The results showed that terrain effects can been effectively removed and the correlation between forest biomass and backscatter coefficient are improved after three-stage terrain correction. The HV polarization has the best correlation with the forest AGB (R = 0.75) and the correlation coefficient was increased about 0.3 compared with uncorrected case.