A tomographic approach to polarimetrie radar cross-section imaging

Three-dimensional radar cross-section (RCS) images are a valuable support for understanding the scattering events occurring at a radar target. Traditional RCS measurement methods require a large angular range and many measurement points to provide sufficient resolution and unambiguousness. This paper proposes the usage of high-resolution techniques, enabled by taking only the polarimetric signal components into account. Therefore, the geometry of a compact antenna test range is integrated into a signal model similar to the one of the direction of arrival (DOA) problem. Subsequently, Bartlett-Beamformer, Multiple Signal Classification (MuSiC) and Deterministic Maximum Likelihood (DML) are adapted and analyzed according to their performance regarding tomographic RCS imaging. The validation of this approach is done by measuring a reference target's RCS along three dimensions. A comparison of the results of the three algorithms is provided in the end, constituting the advantages of MuSiC.