Polarimetric passive radar. A practical approach to parametric adaptive detection

Polarimetric diversity has been recently shown to significantly improve the target detection performance in passive radar systems, if properly exploited to mitigate the competing interference. An adaptive processing scheme is presented in this work, leveraging the information conveyed using multi-polarized receiving antennas and modeling the disturbance as a multichannel autoregressive process. Despite this approach operates with a limited number of adaptive degrees of freedom, the long integration time exploited by passive radar typically requires a substantial computational cost and ad hoc expedients for its application. Therefore, a modified cost-effective implementation of the conceived solution is proposed in order to reduce the computational burden while controlling the resulting loss. The authors extensively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution against experimental data collected by a FM radio based passive coherent location system. The experimental results show that the proposed processing scheme yields a remarkable improvement with respect to both the conventional processing at the single polarimetric channel and the state-of-the-art strategies exploiting polarization diversity in PCL systems.