Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging With MATLAB Algorithms, 2nd Edition

10Polarimetric ISAR Imaging

Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging has been generally utilized for target detection, automatic target classification (ATC), and automatic target recognition (ATR) applications (Musman et al. 1996; Kim et al. 2005; Baumgartner 2018). In most ISAR systems, the radar's antenna is usually polarized with a specific linear polarization, either vertical or horizontal. As given in more detail in Chapter 2, Section 2.3, the radar cross section (RCS) of an object is also dependent on the polarization of the incoming wave. Therefore, some features of the target cannot be extracted via the selected polarization. In fact, as we shall see next, some structures either manmade or natural are sensitive to some polarization and not others. Therefore, using different polarization of the radar's antenna will definitely yield more features of the target to be sensed by the receiver such that the probability of classifying and recognizing the target will eventually increase. Also, the ATC and ATR procedures in traditional single‐polarization ISAR imaging are usually be done by assessing the amplitude‐ISAR image of the target without exploiting its phase information. With the use of other polarization in ISAR images will offer the opportunity of using the phase information of each single‐polarization ISAR image for further signal and image processing tools to improve the ATC and ATR applications. All these features of polarimetric usage of ISAR imaging will ...