Polarimetric inverse synthetic aperture radar

Pol-ISAR has proven to be more accurate and more effective than single-channel ISAR when used for target recognition. Given the limited amount of such systems and available data and literature, this is a field that can still benefit from additional study and experimentation to fully exploit its potential. The use of polarimetry involves additional receiving channels in the radar system and therefore it increases the complexity of cost of the overall radar system. This creates a trade-off that must be considered when designing ISAR systems for target recognition. Nevertheless, when size, weight, power and cost constraints are favourable, the benefit of using full polarization is significant both in terms of image quality, by producing better focused images, and in terms of the amount of information (features) that can be exploited to improve target classification performances.