Ionospheric Error Correction and Image Enhancement for Spaceborne Ice-Sounding Radar

Abstract Current ice-sounding radars can be divided into two categories, i.e., vehicular platform and airborne platform. The former possesses high detection accuracy, but its disadvantage restricts the measurement in narrow coverage range. The latter could achieve wide observation range instead of precise positioning capability. While spaceborne ice-sounding radar has the advantages of sensitive timeliness, stable time series and high detection efficiency, which is of great significance for scientific research of the three polar regions. In this paper, a novel ionospheric error correction and image enhancement method for spaceborne ice-sounding radar has been presented. Firstly, theoretical echo model of spaceborne ice-sounding radar is established based on real measured ionospheric data, and the influence of background ionosphere on receiving signal with small bandwidth and low carrier frequency is quantitatively analyzed. On this basis, the universal ionospheric error correction objective function is derived to remove the ionosphere effect. Finally, the cartoon G-channel component of ice-sounding image can be extracted by employing the improved MCA (Morphological Component Analysis) model, and thus to enhance the regional contrast of subglacial lake and other background units. Experimental results based on real measured data verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.