Polarimetric MIMO radar detection for correlated fluctuating targets

We consider the the detection problem of the polarimetric MIMO radar in the presence of the arbitrary correlated, possibly non-identically distributed target backscattered echoes, which is often appeared in both the transmit-receive (T-R) pairs and the different polarimetric channels. We obtain a fully adaptive detector employing two-step design strategy. Specifically, we first derive the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) by assuming the known polarimetric covariance matrices (PCMs). Then, we replace them with their maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) computing by secondary data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the adaptive GLRT, accounting for generalized chi distributions and correlations among the target amplitudes, via some numerical simulations.