Study on stealth target detection performance of polarimetric MIMO radar

Multiple input multiple output(MIMO) radar with widely separated antennas exploited spatial diversity to obtain more information about target while polarimetric radar offered improved performance by exploiting polarization diversity.When detecting the stealth target in some observed angle,the tradition polarization radar would suffer big radar cross section(RCS) attenuation;therefore its detection performance could not be good enough.This paper proposed a radar system that combines the gains offered by polarimetric diversity and spatial diversity,namely polarimetric statistical MIMO radar,which further outperforms conventional polarization radar systems and could get better performance when detecting stealth target.It demonstrated the relevant model and derived the analysis formula of its detection performance.It is revealed that polarimetric statistical MIMO radar's detection performance is better than those of conventional phased array radar and non-polarimetric statistical MIMO radar.Considering the RCS characteristics of the stealth target,the detector properties of polarimetric MIMO radar have significant advantages.Finally,the results are verified by using simulations.