Abstract
In this work, we focus on passive polarimetric ISAR for ship target imaging using DVB-S signals of opportunity. A first goal of the research is to investigate if, within the challenging passive environment, different scattering mechanisms, belonging to distinct parts of the imaged target, can be separated in the polarimetric domain. Furthermore, a second goal is at verifying if polarimetric diversity could enable the formation of ISAR products with enhanced quality with respect to the single channel case, particularly in terms of better reconstruction of the target shape. To this purpose, a dedicated trial has been conducted along the river Rhine in Germany by means of an experimental DVB-S based system developed at Fraunhofer FHR and considering a ferry as cooperative target. To avoid inaccuracies due to data-driven motion compensation procedures and to fairly interpret the polarimetric results, we processed the data by means of a known-motion back-projection algorithm obtaining ISAR images at each polarimetric channel. Then, different approaches in the polarimetric domain have been introduced. The first one is based on the well-known Pauli Decomposition. The others can be divided in two main groups: (i) techniques aimed at separating the different backscattering mechanisms, and (ii) image domain techniques to fuse the polarimetric information in a single ISAR image with enhanced quality. The different considered techniques have been applied to several data sets with distinct bistatic geometries. The obtained results clearly demonstrate the potentialities of polarimetric diversity that could be fruitfully exploited for classification purposes.
Highlights
N OWADAYS passive radar sensors are the object of a rising interest by the worldwide scientific community.The exploitation of existing transmissions offers an exciting chance to perform radar tasks with no requirements for a dedicated transmitting segment
We investigate the possibility to exploit polarimetric data to enhance the quality of the digital video broadcasting-satellite (DVB-S) based passive inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imagery, with specific regard to ship targets
In this work, we have investigated and demonstrated the potentialities of polarimetric diversity for passive ISAR imaging
Summary
N OWADAYS passive radar sensors are the object of a rising interest by the worldwide scientific community. Satellites signals are less sensitive to multipath and shadowing effects, the transmitters are not vulnerable in situations of man-made or natural disasters and they can provide a much wider accessibility and coverage on the global scale This latter characteristic is attractive in maritime scenarios where the coverage offered by terrestrial sources is inherently limited, and recent works focused on ship target detection/localization with passive radar systems based on communication and navigation satellites [12]–[16]. In this work, aiming at exploiting the nice properties of DVB-S signals and adding polarimetric capabilities to the system despite the above limitations, we will investigate two main questions: 1) Can different scattering mechanisms, belonging to different parts of the imaged target, be separated in the polarimetric domain in the passive system?
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