Accurate Insect Orientation Extraction Based on Polarization Scattering Matrix Estimation

A novel insect orientation extraction method is proposed based on the target polarization scattering matrix (PSM) estimation, which is applicable for traditional vertical-looking insect radar with noncoherent reception as well as the coherent radar. The insect echo signal at different polarization directions on the radar polarization plane is usually acquired by means of rotating linearly polarized antenna. In this letter, the insect echo signal is first used to accurately estimate insect PSM by an iterative algorithm based on the second-order polynomial approximation. Meanwhile, the Cramer–Rao lower bound is also analyzed to test the estimation performance. Next, based on the assumption that the target orientation is consistent with the dominant eigenvector, the insect orientation is extracted from the estimated PSM. Finally, both theoretical simulations and real experimental data are used to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed method, which can achieve good orientation estimation accuracy at low signal-to-noise ratio.