Initial investigations into achievable target detection performance in sea clutter with fully polarimetric radar

The use of full (quad) polarisation to improve target detection performance in sea clutter compared to single polarisation radar is explored. For surveillance (search) radar, little information is available in open literature dealing with the detection performance gained using a fully polarimetric radar system. In this paper, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves are calculated for the three single polarisation cases as well as the full polarisation case. It is shown that a fully polarimetric radar system gives better detection performance compared to a single channel radar system when using an envelope detector. Use was made of the full polarisation IPIX clutter data set and the RCS of the speedboat target was simulated using asymptotic computational electromganetic techniques.