Evaluation of Waveform Structure Features on Time Domain Target Recognition under Cross Polarization

Abstract

Classification of aircraft targets from scattered electromagnetic waves is a challenging application which suffers from aspect angle dependency. In order to eliminate the adverse effects of aspect angle various strategies were developed including the techniques that rely on extraction of several features and design of suitable classification systems to process them. Recently a hierarchical method which uses features that take advantage of waveform structure of the scattered signals is introduced and shown to have effective results. However this approach has been applied to the special cases that consider only a single planar component of electric field that cause no-cross polarization at the observation point. In this study two small scale aircraft models Boeing-747 and DC-10 are selected as the targets and various polarizations are used to analyse the cross-polarization effects on system performance of the aforementioned method. The results reveal the advantages and the shortcomings of using waveform structures in time-domain target identification.