{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,12]],"date-time":"2025-10-12T03:35:58Z","timestamp":1760240158396,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":46,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"7","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,3,27]],"date-time":"2019-03-27T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1553644800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["41571337"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["41571337"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>GaoFen-3 (GF-3) is the first Chinese civilian multi-polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, launched on 10 August of 2016, and put into operation at the end of January 2017. The polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) system of GF-3 is able to provide quad-polarization (quad-pol) images in a variety of geophysical research and applications. However, this ability increases the complexity of maintaining image quality and calibration. As a result, to evaluate the quality of polarimetric data, polarimetric signatures are necessary to guarantee accuracy. Compared with some other operational space-borne PolSAR systems, such as ALOS-2\/PALSAR-2 (ALOS-2) and RADARSAT-2, GF-3 has less reported calibration and image quality files, forcing users to validate the quality of polarimetric imagery of GF-3 before quantitative applications. In this study, without the validation data obtained from a calibration infrastructure, an innovative, three-hierarchy strategy was proposed to assess PolSAR data quality, in which the performance of GF-3 data was evaluated with ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2 data as references. Experimental results suggested that: (1) PolSAR data of GF-3 satisfied backscatter reciprocity, similar with that of RADARSAT-2; (2) most of the GF-3 PolSAR images had no signs of polarimetric distortion affecting decomposition, and the system of GF-3 may have been improved around May 2017; and (3) the classification accuracy of GF-3 varied from 75.0% to 91.4% because of changing image-acquiring situations. In conclusion, the proposed three-hierarchy approach has the ability to evaluate polarimetric performance. It proved that the residual polarimetric distortion of calibrated GF-3 PolSAR data remained at an insignificant level, with reference to that of ALOS-2 and RADARSAT-2, and imposed no significant impact on the polarimetric decomposition components and classification accuracy.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s19071493","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,3,29]],"date-time":"2019-03-29T03:38:52Z","timestamp":1553830732000},"page":"1493","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["A Three-Hierarchy Evaluation of Polarimetric Performance of GF-3, Compared with ALOS-2\/PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"19","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5778-3769","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zezhong","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jian","family":"Jiao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1020-064X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Qiming","family":"Zeng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Junyi","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,3,27]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yin, J., Yang, J., and Zhang, Q. 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