Short-Time Maritime Target Detection Based on Polarization Scattering Characteristics

In this paper, a detection method combining Cameron decomposition based on polarization scattering characteristics in sea clutter background is proposed. Firstly, the Cameron decomposition is exploited to fuse the radar echoes of full polarization channels at the data level. Due to the artificial material structure on the surface of the target, it can be shown that the non-reciprocity of the target cell is stronger than that of the clutter cell. Then, based on the analysis of the decomposition results, a new feature with scattering geometry characteristics in polarization domain, denoted as Cameron polarization decomposition scattering weight (CPD-SW), is extracted as the test statistic, which can achieve more detailed descriptions of the clutter scattering characteristics utilizing the difference between their scattering types. Finally, the superiority of the proposed CPD-SW detector over traditional detectors in improving detection performance is verified by the IPIX measured dataset, which has strong stability under short-time observation in threshold detection and can also improve the separability of feature space zin anomaly detection.