Polarimetric synthetic range profile autofocusing via contrast optimization

One of the main benefits brought by the use of fully polarimetric radars is the ability to identify the scattering mechanism, which is related to target physical properties. One of the most critical problems in synthetic range profile reconstruction is the distortion induced by the target motion. Radial target velocity and acceleration generate second and third order phase terms in the received signal, which produce range shift and point spread function (PSF) smearing. The distortions induced by the target motion produce, as a consequence, a SNR loss. Recently, a method based on contrast maximisation has been proposed to compensate target radial motions in single polarisation radar. In this paper, an extension of such an algorithm is proposed that exploits full polarisation.