Adaptive polarimetric detection of range spread targets in heavy-tailed compound-Gaussian clutter

The problem of detection for range spread targets is analyzed in complex clutter with unknown statistical characteristics. With polarization information of radar echo and training data available to estimate covariance matrix of clutter, a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) based adaptive polarimetric detector is proposed. Then, the analytic expression of false alarm probability is derived to prove constant with respect to the clutter energy and clutter covariance matrix in theory. The simulation results show that the adaptive polarmetric detector achieves good detect probability even at a low target to clutter ratio, and has better detection performance than the adaptive polarimetric detector of point target and the adaptive detector using single polarization.