Compatibility Assessment of Multistatic/Polarimetric Clutter Data with the SIRP Model

Abstract

This article deals with the statistical inference of simultaneously recorded co- and cross-polarized bistatic coherent sea-clutter returns at S-band. This study is conducted employing appropriate statistical learning tools, involving the complex envelope of data, to assess the compliance of the available measurements with the spherically invariant random process (SIRP) representation, as well as to analyze possible texture correlations among the diverse polarimetric channels. Moreover, the spatial heterogeneity of the sea-clutter data is studied. The results highlight that the SIRP model is a good candidate for the representation of bistatic coherent clutter and usually the coherence time of the SIRP texture at the bistatic nodes is longer than that in the monostatic sensing. Notably, at bistatic angles in order of 60°, the quadrature components of the cross-polarized bistatic measurements substantially exhibit a Gaussian behavior. These achievements further shed light on the bistatic sea-clutter diversity from the geometric and polarimetric point of view.