Persymmetric Adaptive Polarimetric Detection of Subspace Range-Spread Targets in Compound Gaussian Sea Clutter

This paper focuses on the adaptive detection of range and Doppler dual-spread targets in non-homogeneous and non-Gaussian sea clutter. The sea clutter from two polarimetric channels is modeled as a compound-Gaussian model with different parameters, and the target is modeled as a subspace range-spread target model. The persymmetric structure is used to model the clutter covariance matrix, in order to reduce the reliance on secondary data of the designed detectors. Three adaptive polarimetric persymmetric detectors are designed based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), Rao test, and Wald test. All the proposed detectors have constant false-alarm rate property with respect to the clutter texture, the speckle covariance matrix. Experimental results on simulated and measured data show that three adaptive detectors outperform the competitors in different clutter environments, and the proposed GLRT detector has the best detection performance under different parameters.