Real-time and full polarimetric FM-CW radar and its application to the classification of targets

The Sinclair scattering matrix plays a decisive role in radar polarimetry. For realization of a real-time and full polarimetric radar, there are some technical problems associated with hardware implementations. Since the FM-CW radar system is suitable for short-range sensing applications, we modified an FW-CW radar to a real-time and polarimetric system by adding a PIN diode-switching circuitry for antenna polarization changes. A parallel operation scheme in the signal processing and the radar control is employed in a personal computer, which enables 44 snapshots for acquiring scattering matrices and displays the polarimetric target classification results along 43 radar ranges per second. In this paper, we present the hardware design of the system and its fundamental application to the classification of targets using the three-component decomposition theorem