Polarimetric coherent adaptive detection against compound-Gaussian clutter

Abstract

This paper aims at the derivation of a polarimetric coherent adaptive scheme to detect a radar target against a nonGaussian background. A generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detector is derived, that is able to exploit the polarimetric characteristics of the received radar echoes to improve the detection performance. The proposed polarimetric detector is shown to have constant false alarm rate (CFAR) when operating against compound-Gaussian clutter with unknown parameters. Its performance is fully characterized by both theoretical analysis and simulation. Moreover, the application to recorded radar data demonstrates the performance improvement achievable in practice.