A NOVEL FIELD SCATTERING FORMULATION FOR POLARIMETRIC SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR: 3D SCATTERING AND STOKES VECTORS

Conventional Far-field decomposition of the scattered electromagnetic (EM) field in the [EH] plane in terms of the horizontal and vertical components (i.e., h, v), introduces ambiguity for multi static, multi-platform and/or scene-centric polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image exploitation. This is due to the fact that a 2-dimensional (2D) vector field can not constitute a complete space capable of modeling 3-dimensional (3D) field transformations. To address this, analytic extension of the Stokes and scattering vectors to 3D is explored and presented. In particular, coherent 3D polarimetric decomposition in Gell-Mann basis is introduced and explored as 3D generalization of standard Pauli decomposition. The results are also applicable to compact polarimetry (CP) where mathematically consistent 3D Stokes parameters can be defined.