New generation polarimetric sars for sea oil slick observation: Full-polarimetric vs compact-polarimetric architectures

In this paper, a comparitive analysis between full-polarimetric (FP) and compact-polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) architectures is performed within the frame of sea oil slick observation. Those architectures provide similar results in terms of detection/discrimination capability, but subtle differences apply. The latter are here investigated through an eigen-analysis undertaken using the X-Bragg sea surface scattering model. Predictions based on the theoretical model are verified by experiments undertaken on actual FP SAR measurements, from which CP SAR data are emulated. Results confirm the soundness of the proposed analysis, pointing out that CP SAR achieve performance that tends to that of FP ones, and that the different behavior they exhibit even on slick-free sea surface can be explained by the different eigenvalues of polarimetric observables, i. e., the coherency matrix T and the wave coherency matrix Tw for FP and CP SAR, respectively.