Emerging Trends in Radar: Fully Polarimetric Calibration and Processing

Polarimetric signatures play key roles in electromagnetic characterization of radar targets. It is mandatory for any real-world polarimetric radar system to be fully calibrated to remove the impact of channel distortion and interchannel crosstalk on the measured polarimetric scattering matrices if we are to understand what polarimetric signatures actually are, and if we are to exploit the data for radar image understanding, classification, recognition, and so on. In this article, we concentrate on the issues for accurate calibration and processing for fully polarimetric radar systems, which are becoming increasingly important in both low radar cross-section development and cognitive radar sensing.