Multi-static target detection in K-distributed sea clutter and Gaussian noise

Recent experimental studies of bi-static dual polarised sea-clutter returns have demonstrated that for widely separated receive sites, there is little correspondence between clutter 'spiking' events. This suggests that a multi-static polarimetric radar network with appropriately separated nodes has the potential for significant detection performance improvement when compared to a traditional mono-static radar. In this study, we demonstrate the improved detection performance using different detection schemes which non-coherently fuse the data processed from the different radar nodes. In a real radar system, there is always Gaussian noise present and hence the limiting effect of additive Gaussian noise is also quantified through accurate simulation of the sea-clutter.