Pol-InISAR Approach for 3D Imaging of Non-Cooperative Targets

This webinar presentation will describe a Polarimetric Interferometry Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pol-InISAR)-based novel 3D imaging approach for detecting complex non-cooperative military targets in their true 3D form. 3D imaging overcomes the limitations of 2D imaging methods related to the unknown IPP (image projection plane) and the requirement of cross-range scaling. 3D imaging of non-cooperative targets becomes possible by combining additional information of interferometric phase along with conventional 2D ISAR imaging. In the previously reported single-polarimetry InISAR-based 3D imaging, only a single-channel interferometric phase is available, which can be exploited to reconstruct the 3D ISAR image. This limits the ability to obtain the full target's scattering response and, therefore, limits the estimation of an accurate interferometric phase. To overcome this constraint, full-polarimetry ISAR information is exploited, allowing the selection of the optimal polarimetric combination that provides the highest coherence. Higher coherence leads to a reduction, optimally a minimization, of the phase estimation error. Consequently, with optimal phase estimation, accurate 3D imaging of the target is possible. To validate this proposed Pol-InISAR-based 3D imaging approach, both simulated and real datasets are taken into consideration.