PA-GLRT for Intra-Pulse Polarization-Coding Radar Detection

This letter addresses target detection for intra-pulse polarization-coding radar, where conventional fixed-polarization detectors cannot fully exploit the polarization variation within a pulse. A polarization-agile generalized likelihood ratio test (PA-GLRT) is developed to jointly process the observations from different polarization segments and adapt to correlated disturbance using training data. The proposed method does not require prior knowledge of the target polarimetric scattering matrix, and practical false-alarm control is achieved through threshold calibration. Numerical results show that PA-GLRT outperforms fixed-polarization and known-template benchmarks, benefits from increasing the number of segments, and remains robust to target scattering variations.