A background extraction technique for polarimetric RCS measurement

Background clutter is one of the major factors which degrade the accuracy in radar cross section (RCS) measurement. In this paper, a novel technique is proposed for simultaneous polarimetric background clutter extraction and target polarimetric scattering matrix (PSM) calibration is proposed. The technique deploys the fact that for any polarimetric channel, if the returned signals of a dihedral rotating around the radar line of sight (LOS) are sampled over an integer multiple of 180° rotation, the mathematic expectation of the dihedral signal samples as a function of the rotating angle is equal to zero. Numerical simulation demonstrates the excellent performance of the proposed technique.