Polarimetric calibration and its influence on target recognition performance

Fully polarimetric radars that use polarization diversity on transmit and receive and thus provide the full scattering matrix, are subject to effects like cross-talk and channel imbalance. These distortions have to be eliminated by means of a polarimetric calibration in order to warrant compatibility between training data and testing data that were measured at different times or even by different radar sensors. It is shown for different types of classification features (geometric, statistical, polarimetric, structural) how an insufficient PolCal may influence the ATR performance.