Man-Made Target Scattering Characterization and Recognition via Null-Pol Modulation Learning

Man-made targets subjected to different polarized waves will produce different depolarization effects, and these differences contain abundant information beneficial for recognition. However, traditional manually designed features struggle to fully utilize polarimetric information for scattering characterization. This letter proposes a target scattering characteristic learning network based on the Null-Pol response, which adaptively extracts the proportions of typical scattering mechanisms from mixed scattering mechanisms. Firstly, by leveraging polarimetric modulation, the Discrete Null-Pol Synthesis Pattern (DNSP) is designed to fully reveal the differences in target scattering mechanisms. On this basis, we propose an end-to-end scattering inversion network module to learn the DNSPs of different typical targets under scattering ambiguity conditions, obtaining polarimetric scattering contribution of 10 typical structures. Finally, we conduct structure recognition experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed module. The results show that the proposed method can effectively characterize scattering behavior and significantly improve the performance of target structure recognition.