Polarisation Coherence Tomography (PCT)

Abstract:
In this paper we introduce a new radar imaging technique called Polarization Coherence Tomography or PCT, which employs variation of the interferometric coherence with polarization to reconstruct a vertical profile function in penetrable volume scattering. We first show how this profile function can be efficiently represented as a Fourier-Legendre series and then how, with only a single baseline, we can reconstruct this series up to a second order polynomial expansion. We investigate the single baseline conditioning of the matrix inversion associated with tomography and demonstrate that for sufficient multi-looking (around 50) stable retrievals of profiles can be obtained. We apply the technique to simulated L-band coherent radar data to demonstrate its potential for new applications in radar remote sensing.