Fast 3D Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging from Polarization-Diverse Measurements

An innovative 3-D radar imaging technique is developed for fast and efficient identification and characterization of radar backscattering components of complex objects, when the collected scattered field is made of polarizationdiverse measurements. In this context, all the polarimetric information seems irretrievably mixed. A direct model, derived from a simple but original extension of the widespread “multiple scattering model” leads to a high dimensional linear inverse problem. It is solved by a fast dedicated imaging algorithm that performs to determine at a time three huge 3-D scatterer maps which correspond to HH, VV and HV polarizations at emission and reception. It is applied successfully to various mock-ups and data sets collected from an accurate and dedicated 3D spherical experimental layout that provides concentric polarization-diverse RCS measurements.