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 polarization-diverse 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.