RS2 -- RadarSat 2 XML Product

This driver will read some RadarSat 2 XML polarimetric products. In particular complex products, and 16bit magnitude detected products.

The RadarSat 2 XML products are distributed with a primary XML file called product.xml, and a set of supporting XML data files with the actual imagery stored in TIFF files. The RS2 driver will be used if the product.xml or the containing directory is selected, and it can treat all the imagery as one consistent dataset.

The complex products use "32bit void typed" TIFF files which are not meaningfully readable normally. The RS2 driver takes care of converting this into useful CInt16 format internally.

The RS2 driver also reads geolocation tiepoints from the product.xml file and represents them as GCPs on the dataset.

It is very likely that RadarSat International will be distributing other sorts of datasets in this format; however, at this time this driver only supports specific RadarSat 2 polarimetric products. All other will be ignored, or result in various runtime errors. It is hoped that this driver can be generalized when other product samples become available.

Data Calibration

If you wish to have GDAL apply a particular calibration LUT to the data when you open it, you have to open the appropriate subdatasets. The following subdatasets exist within the SUBDATASET domain for RS2 products:

uncalibrated - open with RADARSAT_2_CALIB:UNCALIB: prepended to filename
beta₀ - open with RADARSAT_2_CALIB:BETA0: prepended to filename
sigma₀ - open with RADARSAT_2_CALIB:SIGMA0: prepended to filename
gamma - open with RADARSAT_2_CALIB:GAMMA: prepended to filename

Note that geocoded (SPG/SSG) products do not have this functionality available. Also be aware that the LUTs must be in the product directory where specified in the product.xml, otherwise loading the product with the calibration LUT applied will fail.

One caveat worth noting is that the RADARSAT-2 driver will supply the calibrated data as GDT_Float32 or GDT_CFloat32 depending on the type of calibration selected. The uncalibrated data is provided as GDT_Int16/GDT_Byte/GDT_CInt16, also depending on the type of product selected.