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The GaoFen-3 (GF-3) satellite is the first fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite designed for civil use in China. The satellite operates in the C-band and has 12 imaging modes for various applications. Three fully polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) imaging modes are provided with a resolution of up to 8 m. Although polarimetric calibration (PolCAL) of the SAR system is periodically undertaken, there is still some residual distortion in the images. In order to assess the polarimetric accuracy of this satellite and improve the image quality, we analyzed the polarimetric distortion errors and performed a PolCAL experiment based on scattering properties and corner reflectors. The experiment indicates that the GF-3 images can meet the satellite’s polarimetric accuracy requirements, i.e., a channel imbalance of 0.5 dB in amplitude and ±10 degrees in phase and a crosstalk accuracy of -35 dB. However, some images still contain residual polarimetric distortion. The experiment also shows that the residual errors of the GF-3 standard images can be diminished after further PolCAL, with a channel imbalance of 0.26 dB in amplitude and ±0.2 degrees in phase and a crosstalk accuracy of -42 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised change detection approaches, which are relatively straightforward and easy to implement and interpret, and which require no human intervention, are widely used in change detection. Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR), which has an all-weather response capability with increased polarimetric information, is a key tool for change detection. However, for PolSAR data, inadequate evaluation of the difference image (DI) map makes the threshold-based algorithms incompatible with the true distribution model, which causes the change detection results to be ineffective and inaccurate. In this paper, to solve these problems, we focus on the generation of the DI map and the selection of the optimal threshold. An omnibus test statistic is used to generate the DI map from multi-temporal PolSAR images, and an improved Kittler and Illingworth algorithm based on either Weibull or gamma distribution is used to obtain the optimal threshold for generating the change detection map. Multi-temporal PolSAR data obtained by the Radarsat-2 sensor over Wuhan in China are used to verify the efficiency of the proposed method. The experimental results using our approach obtained the best performance in East Lake and Yanxi Lake regions with false alarm rates of 1.59% and 1.80%, total errors of 2.73% and 4.33%, overall accuracy of 97.27% and 95.67%, and Kappa coefficients of 0.6486 and 0.6275, respectively. Our results demonstrated that the proposed method is more suitable than the other compared methods for multi-temporal PolSAR data, and it can obtain both effective and accurate results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]