Improvement of identification of weak-contrast radiolocation targets during monitoring of the Earth surface by radiopolarimetry

This article deals with the aspects of application of polarization processing to improve identification of weak-contrast Earth covers. The closest attention is paid to the analysis of the influence of polarization characteristics of objects including phase and correlation properties of scattering matrix elements on their identification. The authors calculated values of the optimal polarization basis and contrast gain as compared with the initial for several Earth covers for the diagonal and cross elements of the scattering matrix.