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

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 copolarized 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 copolarized 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 full-polarimetric 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 full-polarimetric signals and provides an alternative method to signal acquisition for full-polarimetric imaging.