A general polarimetric radar calibration technique

A polarimetric radar calibration procedure is introduced and verified with experimental results. The procedure requires measurements of three known targets in order to determine the distortion matrices that characterize the effect of the measurement system on the transmitted and received waves. The scattering matrices for the known targets can be of any form, provided that a limited set of constraints is satisfied. A special case, wherein the transmit and receive distortion matrices are the transpose of each other, is considered. This case is useful for some single antenna systems and has the advantage that only two known targets are required