Advanced polarimetric subsurface FM-CW radar

The subsurface radar suffers from two typical problems, i.e., strong clutter from surface and severe wave attenuation in the underground. This paper presents a unique countermeasure to these problems using a polarimetric FM-CW radar and an equivalent sensitivity time control (STC) technique. We apply the polarimetric filtering principle to suppress surface clutter either in the Co-pol channel or in the X-pol channel of synthetic aperture radar, yielding to polarimetric enhanced target image. This technique works when the surface clutter and target have different polarization properties. Moreover, we use an equivalent STC technique specially suited for FM-CW radar for a deep object sounding to compensate wave attenuation within the ground, These techniques contribute to a significant improvement of the radar performance and the detection image contrast, although the detection of the target is in general a much more complicated topic. The field experiments were carried out to show the usefulness of the method. Some detection results are presented.