Polarization Scattering Matrix Analysis for Weak Target Detection in Sea Clutter

Abstract

The polarization information involved in radar echoes could be used to effectively distinguish targets in clutter backgrounds. In this paper, a detection method is proposed based on the characteristics of polarization scattering matrix (PSM) for detecting of weak moving targets in sea clutter. The orientation angle and the amplitude of the maximum return are obtain by the eigenvalue decomposition of the PSM to separate target echo and sea clutter. Meanwhile, the fluctuation of the polarization scattering characteristics between adjacent pulses is also considered with the help of the CP decomposition of the tensor constructed by the PSMs. Based on the feature space which has effectively distinguished target echo and sea clutter, the support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to detect target within sea clutter. Experiments based on real sea clutter data in IPIX database show that the proposed detector could effectively improves the performance for weak targets detection in sea clutter.