A Novel Approach to Full-Polarimetric Short-Range Imaging with Co-polarized Data

Abstract

A novel approach to full-polarimetric short-range imaging with rotating arrays is proposed. Instead of taking advantage of all four possible combinations of the polarizations of transmit and receive antennas as in the typical full-polarimetric imaging systems, the suggested antenna array acquires three different co-polarized measurements at each spatial sampling point with its rotation. A simple algebraic operation is derived to accurately retrieve the full-polarimetric signals in the H/V polarization basis from the co-polarized measurements. After the retrieval of the full-polarimetric signals, the traditional imaging algorithms can be applied to reconstruct the polarimetric images. The effectiveness and accuracy of the suggested approach to fullpolarimetric imaging are validated on the signal and image levels through both numerical simulations and experiments. The results show that the proposed approach can accurately retrieve the fullpolarimetric signals and provides an alternative method to signal acquisition for full-polarimetric imaging.