Polarimetric Passive Radar: A Practical Approach to Parametric Adaptive Detection

Polarimetric diversity has been recently shown to significantly improve the target detection performance in the passive radar systems if properly exploited to mitigate the competing interference. An adaptive processing scheme is presented in this article, leveraging the information conveyed using multipolarized receiving antennas and modeling the disturbance as a multichannel autoregressive process. Despite the fact that this approach operates with a limited number of the adaptive degrees of freedom, the long integration time exploited by a 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 the experimental data collected by an 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 the polarization diversity in passive radars.