The Rao and Wald Tests Designed for Distributed Targets with Polarization MIMO Radar in Compound-Gaussian Clutter

In high resolution radars, the distributed target is usually modeled as a few isolated points referred to multiple dominant scattering centers, while the clutter is a compound-Gaussian model. Additionally, the polarimetric diversity can be exploited to enhance detection performance. Motivated by extending the detection problem of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar to such cases, this paper mainly addresses distributed targets detection problem with polarization MIMO radar against a compound-Gaussian clutter dominated scenario with unknown covariance matrix. The adaptive detectors based on Rao and Wald criteria are studied, and a two-step design procedure is adopted. Specifically, the Rao and Wald tests are derived by assuming a known covariance matrix, and then a suitable estimation of the covariance matrix based on the secondary data is inserted into the derived detectors to make them fully adaptive. Some numerical results are presented together with a polarization generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), showing that the derived detectors provide excellent detection performance in spiky clutter for distributed targets, and that the polarimetric diversity can be exploited to improve detection performance. Overall, the Wald test performs the best.