Enhanced PGA for Dual-Polarized ISAR Imaging by Exploiting Cloude-Pottier Decomposition

Dual-polarized inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) systems can provide more extra information than single-polarized ISAR systems, which can be used to increase image quality during the imaging process. However, there is limited research on the subject of dual-polarized ISAR. In this letter, an enhanced phase gradient autofocus (PGA) method was proposed for dual-polarized ISAR imaging. The Cloude-Pottier decomposition is employed to extract the polarization parameters
$H$
and
$\alpha $
from the dual-polarized primary image. Subsequently, the PGA is enhanced by selecting high-quality prominent scatterers based on these
$H$
and
$\alpha $
parameters. By making full use of the prominent scatterers selected by polarization information, the performance of PGA was improved, and thus, the imaging quality was significantly improved. Finally, both the real measurement data of aircraft targets and ship targets verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.