In recent years, the development of intelligent sensor systems has experienced remarkable growth, particularly in the domain of microwave and millimeter wave sensing, thanks to the increased availability of affordable hardware components. With the development of smart Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GBSAR) system called GBSAR-Pi, we previously explored object classification applications based on raw radar data. Building upon this foundation, in this study, we analyze the potential of utilizing polarization information to improve the performance of deep learning models based on raw GBSAR data. The data are obtained with a GBSAR operating at 24 GHz with both vertical (VV) and horizontal (HH) polarization, resulting in two matrices (VV and HH) per observed scene. We present several approaches demonstrating the integration of such data into classification models based on a modified ResNet18 architecture. We also introduce a novel Siamese architecture tailored to accommodate the dual input radar data. The results indicate that a simple concatenation method is the most promising approach and underscore the importance of considering antenna polarization and merging strategies in deep learning applications based on radar data.
Keywords: ResNet18; ground-based SAR; object classification; polarization; radar data.