Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 2943: Improved Faraday Rotation Estimation in Spaceborne PolSAR Data Using Total Variation Denoising (Remote Sensing)

Faraday rotation (FR) is a serious problem for spaceborne polarization SAR (PolSAR) systems at L and P bands. One way to solve the problem is to estimate the FR from PolSAR data for further compensation. Therefore, precise estimation of FR from PolSAR data not only determines the compensation effect of polarimetric systems but also benefits the ionospheric sounding with high spatial resolution. Among the factors that affect the FR estimation, system noise is a non-neglectable factor. Although average filtering (AF) has been widely used in previous works for noise removing it depends on large window size, and therefore reduces the spatial resolution of FR estimation. In order to realize optimal noise suppression with minimized resolution loss, the total variation (TV) denoising method is applied in this paper. By testing the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) full-pol datasets, TV and AF are compared and validated. Results using synthetic and real data show that, after TV denoising, the FR can be recovered with high spatial resolution and the noise level in estimated FR is reduced more effectively than that after AF.