Distributed target detection with polarimetric MIMO radar in compound-Gaussian clutter

This paper mainly deals with distributed targets detection with a polarimetric MIMO radar against compound-Gaussian clutter dominated scenario with unknown covariance matrix. First, the general polarimetric detecting problem of the distributed targets is developed to the MIMO radar, and then, the fully adaptive Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) is devised according to the well known two-step design procedure. Three covariance matrix estimation strategies using the secondary data are introduced to make derived receiver fully adaptive. A thorough performance assessment is given, and via several numerical examples, the results highlight that the spatial and polarization diversities can be exploited to improve the detection performance of the distributed targets in compound-Gaussian background, and it outperforms the phased-array counterpart, the adaptive loss is completely acceptable in practical applications. Meanwhile, the fixed-point estimation strategy is more suitable to implement the adaptive detection algorithm. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.