A tomographic approach to polarimetrie radar cross-section imaging

• Published in: 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)
• Main Authors: Moch, R., Dallmann, T., Heberling, D.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: 621; DML
• Online Access: https://publica.fraunhofer.de/handle/publica/402201; https://doi.org/10.23919/EuCAP.2017.7928491

S.3940-3944 Three-dimensional radar cross-section (RCS) images are a valuable support for understanding the scattering events occurring at a radar target. Traditional RCS measurement methods require a large angular range and many measurement points to provide sufficient resolution and unambiguousness. This paper proposes the usage of high-resolution techniques, enabled by taking only the polarimetric signal components into account. Therefore, the geometry of a compact antenna test range is integrated into a signal model similar to the one of the direction of arrival (DOA) problem. Subsequently, Bartlett-Beamformer, Multiple Signal Classification (MuSiC) and Deterministic Maximum Likelihood (DML) are adapted and analyzed according to their performance regarding tomographic RCS imaging. The validation of this approach is done by measuring a reference target's RCS along three dimensions. A comparison of the results of the three algorithms is provided in the end, constituting the advantages of MuSiC.