An Improved Descalloping Method Combined With Imaging Parameters for GaoFen-3 ScanSAR

Due to the specific working mechanism of alternately transmitting and receiving signals between multiple adjacent swaths, scanning synthetic aperture radar (ScanSAR) will cause periodical wavelike modulation of the intensity image along azimuth direction, which is known as scalloping. Conventional descalloping methods are achieved by proper azimuth antenna pattern (AAP) correction and multi-looking techniques but are limited by the accuracy of Doppler centroid estimating and the thermal noise. Another type of method extracts and suppresses the scalloping texture on the image, but the scanning parameters of ScanSAR are insufficiently considered. The period of scalloping on the image is related to the period of switching between subswathes. While the harmonics can be calculated by the period of a periodic signal, an improved frequency filtering method combined with imaging parameters is proposed. The scalloping modulation model of ScanSAR combined with imaging parameters is constructed, and the harmonics of scalloping texture are accurately calculated and filtered. For the low signal to noise ratio (SNR) image, the antenna pattern is modified according to SNR to avoid scalloping caused by noise. For non-uniform scenes, scalloping suppression is achieved by using the scalloping features acquired by uniform scenes. To separate the non-uniform scenes from uniform scenes, we still use the characteristics of harmonics caused by scalloping. Our descalloping method achieves accurate suppression of scalloping without sea-land segmentation and ship mask and the residual scalloping is reduced from 1.0 to 0.3–0.5 dB. The residual scalloping and statistical characteristics of the image are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method