Polarization-space-time domain generalized likelihood ratio detection of radar targets

This paper addresses the problem of combining adaptive polarization processing and space-time processing for further performance improvement of radar target detection in clutter and jammer environments. Since the most straightforward cascade combinations have quite limited performance improvement potentials, we focus on the development of adaptive processing in the joint polarization-space-time domain. Unlike a direct extension of some existing space-time processing algorithms to the joint domain, the processing algorithm developed in this paper does not need a potentially costly polarization filter bank to cover the unknown target polarization parameter. The performance of the new algorithm is derived and evaluated in terms of the probability of detection and the probability of false alarm, and it is compared with other algorithms that do not utilize the polarization information or assume that the target polarization is known.