Antenna Effects on Polarimetric Imagery in Ultrawide Synthetic Aperture Radar

摘要

This paper evaluates the effect of practical antenna limitations on the polarimetric quality of ultrawide SAR imagery. For this analysis we have exploited a thorough set of measurements made on a prototype ultrawide SAR antenna designed to meet a set of realistic requirements consistent with use on UAV platforms as well as manned aircraft. These data comprise fully polarimetric, phase-coherent patterns measured over a full 4 pi steradians. From these data we are able to synthesize the polarimetric response of an ideal target set as it would be measured over an ultrawide SAR aperture (150-550 MHz and 60 deg). By decomposing this synthesized measurement in terms of a canonical basis set of polarized scatterers we can exhibit the level of polarimetric distortions due to a specific practical antenna.