Abstract:Radar echoes depend on the polarization of transmitted electromagnetic waves. Polarization characteristics can be implemented to target recognition and identification. Compact polarimetry synthetic aperture radar systems based on the circular transmit and linear receive combine coherent dual polarization with wideswath imaging. The polarization information in these data may be represented as a Stokes vector. It can be used to reconstruct several quad polarized covariance elements. To obtain the four quad polarized data and detect the target, three reconstruction algorithms have been studied: one by Souyris et al., a refined algorithm by Nord et al. and an improved method by Michael. We investigated their application for reconstructing ocean clutter for the purpose of detecting targets. Moreover, preliminary study shows that the information from the reconstructed data can be used as a feature in target recognition.