Coherent Fusion of Polarization Diversity Channels with Phase-locked Loop for Target Detection

A full polarization radar generally has four polarization channels, whose signals are non-coherently accumulated in general. In this paper, a coherent fusion rule is presented for a full polarization diversity radar. It works in the target tracking mode and uses received signals to estimate and then remove the initial phases of target returns with the phase-locked loop, such that non-coherent target returns can be coherently combined. Simulation results indicate that this method can outperform the non-coherent one significantly in the target tracking mode.