Polarization effects in microwave diversity imaging of perfectly conducting cylinders

A theoretical vector development is derived for the directly and mutually scattered wavefield of two cylinders in a bistatic measuring system. The approach is first to give an expression for the field scattered from a single cylinder illuminated by a right-hand circularly polarized plane wave. This expression is then extended to the case of the directly scattered (or first-order) field of two cylinders. The mutually scattered (or second-order) field of two cylinders is then formulated in terms of a coherent summation of the scattered field from each cylinder due to the incident wave scattered from the other cylinder. In order to simplify computational tasks, only the second-order scattered field is analytically derived; this is called the mutually scattered field. The total wavefield scattered by two cylinders becomes the coherent superposition of the directly scattered component and the mutually scattered component for each polarization. The use of an automated microwave imaging facility employing frequency, polarization and angular diversity to verify the results of theoretical analysis is described. The analytical and experimental results are shown to be in good agreement. The results show that the effects of polarization state transformation or change in the mutually scattered field component are more pronounced than in the directly scattered component