Synthetic aperture radar hybrid-polarity method and architecture for obtaining the stokes parameters of a backscattered field

摘要

A synthetic aperture radar hybrid-polarity method and architecture comprising transmitting circular polarization (by driving the orthogonal linear feeds simultaneously by two identical waveforms, 90° out of phase), and receiving horizontal (H) and vertical (V) linear polarizations, coherently. Once calibrated, the H and V single-look complex amplitude data are sufficient to form all four Stokes parameters, which fully characterize the observed backscattered field.