LAUSR

Man-made targets with various orientations usually exhibit scattering diversity which makes polarimetric radar target recognition difficult. The recently developed polarimetric rotation domain techniques provide solutions to understand and utilize target scattering diversity. Meanwhile, the Null-Pol theory is the important component of target optimal polarization in radar polarimetry. This work first extends the Null-Pol theory into the polarimetric rotation domain and discloses the different scattering responses from canonical man-made structures. In this vein, the Null-Pol response pattern interpretation tool is established and a set of Null-Pol features are extracted and characterized. Then, a man-made structure identification approach is proposed based on selected features derived from the Null-Pol response pattern. Comparison studies are carried out with simulated datasets of canonical structures considering polarimetric measurement errors, simulated, and measured data of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Compared with the Cameron decomposition, the proposed method achieves more accurate and stable performance.