Comparison of performance of polarimetric decomposition techniques to suppress subsurface clutter in GPR applications

The effect of different decomposition techniques on the imaging and detection accuracy for polarimetric surface penetrating radar data is studied. We derive the general expressions for coherent polarimetric decomposition using the model based polarimetric decomposition of Yamaguchi technique and compare these with some Stokes and Pauli coherent polarisation decomposition parameters. These mathematical treatments are then applied to laboratory based X-band (8.2-12.4GHz) full polarimetry near-field radar measurements taken of shallow buried reference and calibration objects and different landmine types. The Yamaguchi polarimetry filters demonstated significant surface and sub-surface clutter reduction and contrast in subsurface imagery, with some loss in signal power. The Stokes and Pauli parameters demonstrated similar clutter reduction in subsurface imagery providing additional beneficial information on the targets scattering mechanism. Combining these techniques contributes to an improvement of subsurface radar discrimination and understanding of the target type.