Polarimetric Passive Millimeter-Wave Imaging of Surface Vessels

Passive millimeter-wave (PMMW) imaging is one of the im-portant approaches for target detection with the background of the sea surface. The fluctuating sea waves and the reflections of surface vessels produce increased difficulties for ob-servers and processing algorithms to detect objects. In this paper, we explore the polarimetric properties of a typical sur-face vessel by PMMW imaging simulation. Stokes and polar-ization parameters have been calculated based on four linear polarization images. The simulated images have been dis-cussed qualitatively and quantitatively by using the contrast ratio (CR) between the vessel and the sea surface. The analy-sis results indicate that polarimetric imaging can improve the detection performance for surface vessels.