Instantaneous Radar Polarimetry with Multiple Dually-polarized Antennas

Fully polarimetric radar systems are capable of simultaneously transmitting and receiving in two orthogonal polarizations. Instantaneous radar polarimetry exploits both polarization modes of a dually-polarized radar transmitter and receiver on a pulse by pulse basis, and can improve the radar detection performance and suppress range sidelobes . In this paper, we extend the use of instantaneous radar polarimetry for radar systems with multiple dually-polarized transmit and receive antennas. Alamouti signal processing is used to coordinate transmission of Golay pairs of phase codes waveforms across polarizations and multiple antennas. The integration of multi- antenna signal processing with instantaneous radar polarimetry can further improve the detection performance, at a computational cost comparable to single channel matched filtering.