Comparative Study of Polarimetric Detection of Range-extended Targets

Polarimetric detection models are established for monopulse detection of rangeextended nonfluctuation targets and Rayleigh fluctuation targets. The corresponding polarimetric detectors are derived, and their detection performance is analytically expressed. Then the relationships between the detection performance and the radar bandwidth, polarization of the target’s echoes, and estimation error of the target’s radial scale are theoretically analyzed, and the detection algorithms proposed in this paper are compared with the polarimetric detection algorithm using binary integration. The results show that, an optimal bandwidth maximizing the detection probability of a Rayleigh target can be found for a given signal-to-noise ratio. The detection performance difference of deterministicallypolarized targets and randomlypolarized targets is remarkable when the radar bandwidth is narrow. When the radar bandwidth is wide, the detection of a randomlypolarized target has a performance loss of about 1.3dB in contrast with the detection of a deterministicallypolarized target. For a Rayleigh target, the detection performance is more sensitive to the underestimate than to the overestimate of the target’s radial scale. The detection performance of binary integration is generally inferior to the detection performance of radial integration, but the performance difference between them is relatively small.