Real-time and full polarimetric FM-CW radar and its application to the classification of targets

The Sinclair scattering matrix plays a decisive role in radar polarimetry. For realization of a real-time and full polarimetric radar, there are sometechnical problems associated with hardware implementations. Since the FM-CWradar system is suitable for short-range sensing applications, we modified an FM-CWradar to a real-time and polarimetric system by adding a PIN diode-switching circuitry for antenna polarization changes. A parallel operation scheme in the signal processing and the radar control is employed in a personal computer, which enables 44 snapshots for acquiring scattering matrices and displays the polarimetric target classification results along 44 radar ranges per second. In this paper, wepresent the hardware design of the system and its fundamental application to the classification of targets using the three-component decomposition theorem.