pp. 717-726
S&M3951 Research Paper of Special Issue https://doi.org/10.18494/SAM5411 Published: February 28, 2025 Geometric Positioning Accuracy Improvement of 1-meter C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar 01 Satellite Images [PDF] Yufan Sun and Maoqiang Jing (Received October 25, 2024; Accepted February 6, 2025) Keywords: synthetic aperture radar, C-SAR, Gaofen-3, absolute positioning accuracy, geolocation validation
The 1-meter C-SAR 01 satellite (C-SAR), launched on November 23, 2021, is a C-band high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite launched by China, similar to Gaofen-3. The images acquired by this satellite are widely used to study land and marine resources. Geometric positioning accuracy is an important index to evaluate the quality of SAR images. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the positioning accuracy of L1A standard products of the C-SAR satellite and determined possible improvements. We used the high-precision calibrator equipment of the Zhongwei calibration field as the checkpoint to evaluate the positioning accuracy of the five image modes of the C-SAR satellite: FSI, FSII, QPSI, QPSII, and SS. Additionally, we used a series of accuracy improvement methods, including azimuth time correction under the “stop-and-go” approximation, atmospheric propagation delay correction, and geometric calibration for the error source of the whole positioning link. We evaluated the positioning accuracy of the improved images. The test results showed that the positioning accuracy of the C-SAR satellite images can be improved to approximately 4 m.
Corresponding author: Maoqiang Jing![]() ![]() This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Cite this article Yufan Sun and Maoqiang Jing, Geometric Positioning Accuracy Improvement of 1-meter C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar 01 Satellite Images, Sens. Mater., Vol. 37, No. 2, 2025, p. 717-726. |