Hybrid Polarimetry Inverse SAR

The Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) exploits the movement of the target to form high-resolution imaging of the target. Further, the multi-polarization acquisition in ISAR gathers additional information on the target’s scattering properties and surface characteristics that help to enhance the imaging capabilities of ISAR. In this manuscript, we suggest a novel multi-polarization ISAR configuration based on the Circular Transmit and Linear Receive (CTLR) combination, namely hybrid-pol ISAR, for the application of non-cooperative target detection and imaging. Hybrid-pol ISAR can capture sufficient information about the targets to characterize them properly, and simultaneously overcomes the demerits of full-polarimetric (full-pol) ISAR associated with the transmission of two pulses to capture a single unit of polarimetric back-scattered information. The real Tank-72 ISAR data is implemented for the validation, which was captured under the MSTAR program by Georgia Technology Research Institute (GTRI).