On foundations of radar polarimetry

Polarization aspects of the radar target scattering problem are reexamined. The optimization problem of radar polarimetry is formulated and Kennaugh´s method of finding optimal polarizations is modified and extended to nonreciprocal and bistatic cases. Our approach does not necessitate diagonalization of the target scattering operator and therefore, a change-of-basis is not required. The change-of-polarization-basis is motivated by the comparison of experimental data taken with different antenna sets. Unitary matrix algebra is used to derive proper transformation formulas for scattering operators and bilinear voltage forms.