Research On Polarization Information Processing Of W-band Radar Targets

Polarization is a very important attribute to descript the target scattering properties. The high resolution range profiles(HRRP) reflect the fine structure characteristics of the targets in the distance dimension. The combination of full polarization and high resolution technology is a great potential development direction for wideband radar. The interior and exterior characteristics of target can be depicted by the properties of polarization scattering and high resolution from different perspectives. These properties could be employed to improve the radar’ performance of detecting precision, object identification, anti-interference and angle glint suppression. In this paper,the research of target polarization information processing is carried out for the W-band fully polarimetric wideband radar system. The main content is extracting target polarization invariants and target polarization decomposition features, researching the target scattering properties, based on full polarization and HRRP of the radar targets. The detailed content is as following:Firstly, the characterization of radar target polarization properties is introduced, including the polarization state and the polarization scattering properties. We utilize the outfield experiment data of two trihedral corner reflectors to extract the polarization scattering matrix. The results show that the detection system owns the ability to obtain wide band full polarization properties of the target. On this basis, we extract the polarization invariants from the polarization scattering matrix. The results verify that the depiction of targets polarization scattering properties by polarization invariants is effective.Secondly, the radar target polarization decomposition is introduced. We process the full polarization data of the car and truck, and extract their polarization features by coherent decomposition methods and a typical incoherent decomposition method. The truck’s valid scattering centers and their polarization scattering mechanism in different attitude angle are analyzed. Analysis results show that the targets polarization features extracted by polarization decomposition can classify and identify the target scattering mechanism.Finally, we propose a method for processing wideband radar target polarization information. Based on the full polarization data and HRRP, the polarization features of the target are extracted by an integrated approach including polarization detection, polarization decomposition and amplitude weighted. We use this method to process the full polarization data of a tank and an armored vehicle, and then compare four targets polarization features. The experimental data processing results show that the polarization scattering features can be extracted by this method and reflect the different of polarization scattering properties among the targets effectively.