Persymmetric Polarimetric Detection in Non-Gaussian Sea Clutter

Abstract

In this paper, we address the polarization diversity detection problem in the non-Gaussian sea clutter environment. Considering the heterogeneous characteristic of the sea clutter, we model it as the compound Gaussian distribution. Based on the two-step generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), Rao test, and Wald test, we propose three persymmetric and polarimetric detectors. In detail, we first assume that the polarimetric clutter covariance matrix (PCCM) is known, and we develop three test statistics of the proposed detectors. In addition, we use persymmetric property to estimate the PCCM, and obtain the adaptive persymmetric detectors by inserting the estimate of PCCM into first-step test statistics. The experiments are conducted by using the simulated data and the real sea clutter data to verify the performance of the proposed persymmetric polarimetric detectors.