A target polarization recognition method for radar echoes

This paper distinguishes ship target from chaff by their difference in depolarization characteristics using fully polarized dual-channel radar which transmits vertical and horizontal polarization wave alternately and receives co-polarization and cross-polarization components simultaneously with two channels. It recognize the target by taking advantage of the difference of the vertical and horizontal depolarization characteristic parameters of the target and chaff in radar echoes, after enlarging the difference between the cross-polarization component and co-polarization component of the radar echoes involving both target and chaff. furthermore, non-linear polarization transformation is adopted to increase the chaff and targets separability and to improve the recognition rate in result. In the end, the recognition result is proved to be more desirable by processing information in polarization domain than in time and frequency domain.