A GLRT-Based Polarimetric Detector for Sea-Surface Weak Target Detection

Abstract

In this letter, different polarization characteristics of the sea clutter and target are considered to address the sea-surface weak target detection problem. We first construct a logarithmic generalized likelihood ratio test (log-GLRT) problem under the compound Gaussian model by considering multiple texture factors of sea clutter and four polarized channels. Based on the log-GLRT framework, a multivariable optimization problem is formulated to obtain the characteristic parameters of sea clutter and target. Then, under the block majorization-minimization (block-MM) framework, three parameters’ estimation strategies are designed to solve the optimization problem of the proposed parameters. Finally, a log-GLRT-based polarimetric detector is proposed by applying the estimated characteristic parameters. The experimental results on the Intelligent PIxel processing Xband (IPIX) data sets demonstrate that our proposed detector can achieve better detection performance than the several existed detectors.