Adaptive Subsurface Imaging based on Peak Phase-Profile: The Significance in Separation of Scattering Phase from Propagation Phase

This paper discusses the separation of scattering phase and propagation phase in radar systems. Recently we proposed a novel radar imaging scheme using complex-valued self-organizing map (CSOM) to deal with time-domain phase profile of subsurface targets. Most of conventional radar imaging schemes pays limited attention to phase information. However, we consider that the phase values represent scattering mechanisms while the amplitude peaks indicate scatterers' distance. Then the phase profile is widely useful in grouping for target recognition. In this paper, we discuss the importance of the explicit separation of the scattering phase from the propagation phase. We also refer to the correspondence of this idea to the use of phasor-quaternion self-organizing map (PQSOM) in our polarimetric radar system. The separation is essential more and more in advanced polarimetric-interferometric radar imaging systems in the near future.