Polarimetric detection of targets in heavy inhomogeneous clutter

M. HURTADO; A. NEHORAI

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

Año: 2008 vol. 56 p. 1349 - 1361

1053-587X

Polarization diversity has proved to be a useful toolfor radar detection, especially when discrimination by Doppler effectis not possible. In this paper, we address the problem of improvingthe performance of polarimetric detectors for targets inheavy inhomogeneous clutter. First, we introduce a new polarimetricradar model that includes the realistic dependence of theclutter reflections on the transmitted signal. Then, we develop a polarimetricdetection test that is robust to inhomogeneous clutter.We run this polarimetric test against synthetic and real data toassess its performance in comparison with existing polarimetricdetectors. Finally, we propose a polarimetric waveform-design algorithmto further improve the target-detection performance. Anumerical analysis is presented to demonstrate the potential performanceimprovement that can be achieved with this algorithm.