Photonics-based Radar Transceiver For Full-Polarimetric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Imaging

A compact photonics-based radar transceiver for simultaneous measurement of all the four elements in target polarization scatting matrix is proposed. In the transmitter, two wideband linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals with complementary chirp slopes are generated as the excitations in different polarizations. In the receiver, de-chirping and decoupling of radar echoes with different polarizations are implemented based on photonic frequency mixing. A proof-of-concept experiment of full-polarimetric inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging is carried out with a bandwidth of 6 GHz (9∼15 GHz). Polarization-dependent ISAR images are successfully recovered, which can verify the feasibility of the proposed radar transceiver.