Quantitative evaluation for compact polarimetric SAR image reconstruction based on information-theoretic analysis

The compact polarimetric mode of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides an approach of polarimetric observation by a reduced PRF and doubled swath width, which has already proven its advantage compared with the traditional full-polarimetry (FP) mode in several occasions. In this paper, a quantitative evaluation method for the compact polarimetric SAR image reconstruction is proposed. The quad-pol data are reconstructed by the iteration algorithm proposed by Souyris et al.. Analysis is carried out on the performance of the algorithm based on information theoretic analysis. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated quantitatively by implementing information entropy, mutual information, Kullback-Leibler distance and difference of entropy between the reconstructed and original FP data. Based on this analysis, several key parameters of this algorithm is verified and optimized.