US Patent 7623064 Instantaneous radar polarimetry

A radar system and method that employs polarization-time diversity in transmitting signals and concurrently processing received reflections from both polarization modes provides information about the scattering matrix of a target without loss of information. Illustratively, the transmitted signals from Golay pairs, and the processing method employs a complex-conjugate time reversal operand. The received reflected signals are processed for a particular distance in mind to develop a scattering matrix of the medium at that distance. By comparing the scattering matrix to known scattering matrices an identification of the target from where the transmitted signals were reflected is obtained.