POLARIMETRIC DETECTION OF SLOWLY MOVING TARGETS EMBEDDED IN STATIONARY GROUND CLUTTER - SUMMARY

In radar detection, the presence of clutter is an undesirable but unav oidable fact. Furthermore, clutter is highly destructive to the detect ion of slow-fluctuating targets, since Doppler filtering can not be ad apted when clutter and targets are moving at approximately the same sp eed. Besides, to face improvements of countermeasure means (absorbent materials, structure geometry, etc.), the setting up of high performan ce detection schemes is mandatory. Radar polarimetry indicates to prov ide the long sought-for solution to these problems. The goal of this r esearch is to estimate the contribution of polarimetry to radar detect ion by evaluating several novel polarimetric detection algorithms and by comparing them to existing coherent single channel-only approaches.