Geometrical structure classification of target HRRP scattering centers based on dual polarimetric H/α features

Polarimetric high resolution range profile (HRRP) contains the geometrical structural information along radar line-of-sight and has shown great potentials in target recognition. In existing researches, H/α decomposition has been applied to exploit global polarimetric features of a single HRRP from its spatially averaged coherent matrix, which loses target local scattering information. In this paper, we propose to apply the H/α decomposition along the slow time dimension in a dual polarimetric HRRP sequence. The H and α features are extracted for each target scattering center by averaging its samples in different observations of the HRRP sequence, which provides both target local high resolution and polarimetric scattering characteristics. We also design a novel six-zone H- α plane for geometrical structure classification of target scattering centers. Simulation and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method and display its good potentials for practical applications.