Auto-regressive model based polarimetric adaptive detection scheme part I. Theoretical derivation and performance analysis

This paper deals with the problem of target detection in coherent radar systems exploiting polarimetric diversity. We resort to a parametric approach and we model the disturbance affecting the data as a multi-channel autoregressive (AR) process. Following this model, a new polarimetric adaptive detector is derived, which aims at improving the target detection capability while relaxing the requirements on the training data size and the computational burden with respect to existing solutions. A complete theoretical characterization of the asymptotic performance of the derived detector is provided, using two different target fluctuation models. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown against simulated data, in comparison with alternative existing solutions.