EXAMINATION OF SPATIAL INTEGRATION METHOD FOR EXTRACTING THE RCS OF A CALIBRATION TARGET FROM SAR IMAGES

This paper presents an examination of the spatial integration method for extracting the RCS of a trihedral corner reflector from SAR images for SAR external calibration. An exact external radiometric calibration technique is required for extracting an exact calibration constant. Therefore, we examine the accuracy of the spatial integration method, which is commonly used for the SAR external radiometric calibration. At first, an SAR image for a trihedral corner reflector is simulated with a high-resolution SAR impulse response with a known theoretical RCS of the reflector, and a background clutter image for the high resolution SAR system is also generated. Then, a SAR image in a high resolution is generated for a trihedral comer reflector located on a background clutter by superposition of the two SAR images. The radar cross section of a trihedral corner reflector in the SAR image is retrieved by integrating the radar signals of the pixels adjacent to the reflector for various size of the integration area. By comparison of the measured RCS by the integration method and the theoretical RCS of the reflector, the effect of the size of the integration area on the extraction of the calibration constant is examined.