PREFACE
The fundamentals of radar polarimetry were built on a long history of research in optics. However, the fact that the radar is an active instrument, allowing one the extra flexibility to change the polarization of the transmitted wave in addition to optimizing the receiving antenna polarization, opened new doors to more powerful analysis of scattering from different types of terrain.
This book describes the application of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar to Earth remote sensing based on our research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Many important contributions to the field of radar polarimetry were made long before we joined the field. Giants in the field include Kennaugh, Sinclair, Huynen, Boerner, and many others. Our contribution is to put their work to practice in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), but we owe thanks to these pioneers for pointing the way.
There is a vast amount of literature available on radar polarimetry. Here we did not try to reproduce or summarize all of these publications. Instead, we concentrated our effort on compiling a subset of the knowledge into a reference that we hoped would prove useful to both the newcomer and the expert in radar polarimetry. We provide a concise description of the mathematical fundamentals illustrated with many examples using SAR data. Our treatment of the subject is focused on remote sensing of the Earth, and the examples are chosen to illustrate this application.
We start with the basics of synthetic ...
