Radar target recognition by polarizationdiversity RCS including random effects

In this paper, the radar target recognition is given by polarization-diversity RCS (radar cross section) including random effects. The polarization-diversity technique means that the RCS is collected by changing polarizations of transmitting and receiving antennas. The goal is to identify the similarity between the unknown and known targets. To increase discrimination and reducing random fluctuating components, collected polarization-diversity RCS data are processed by PCA (principal component analysis) technique prior to identification. Physically, polarizations of electromagnetic waves can access much information of targets. With the use of polarization-diversity RCS technique, it is not necessary to collecting RCS in many angular directions (i.e., angular diversity), or at many frequencies (i.e., frequency diversity). Therefore, this technique is especially suitable for situations which have limitations on positions or frequencies. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed polarization-diversity target recognition scheme is very accurate in identifying targets. In addition, it has good ability to tolerate random fluctuating components. Compared with angular-diversity and frequency-diversity target recognition techniques, the polarization-diversity technique in this study requires less size of RCS databases so that computer resources are saved.