Hybrid-Polarity and Reconstruction Methods for Sea Ice With L- and C-Band SAR

The potential of using the hybrid polarity (HP) mode for sea ice surveillance in L- and C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is investigated. The objective is to study the possibilities to reconstruct a pseudo-quad-polarimetric (QP) covariance matrix using existing and novel reconstruction methods. Our main goal is to study how close the HP mode, in terms of polarimetric information, is to the QP mode. Two new reconstruction methods are proposed and investigated. Although they exhibit similar performance to the known method developed by Souyris et al., they are less complex and do not require any user input. We discovered that the median and standard deviation of the relative error between the true and the estimated cross-polarization intensity are better for the L-band compared to the C-band SAR data. This discovery is based on four pairs of quasi-simultaneous QP SAR images of Arctic sea ice acquired by Radarsat-2 and ALOS-2.