Polarization diversity for detecting targets in heavy inhomogeneous clutter

M. HURTADO; A. NEHORAI

Pisa, Italy

Congreso; International Waveform Diversity and Design Conference; 2007

Polarization diversity has proved to be a useful toolfor radar detection, especially when discrimination by Dopplereffect is not possible. In this paper, we address the problem ofimproving the performance of polarimetric detectors for targetsin heavy inhomogeneous clutter. First, we develop a polarimetricdetection test that is robust to inhomogeneous clutter. We runthis polarimetric test against synthetic and real data to assess itsperformance in comparison with existing polarimetric detectors.Then, we propose a polarimetric waveform-design algorithm tofurther improve the target-detection performance. A numericalanalysis is presented to demonstrate the potential performanceimprovement that can be achieved with this algorithm.