Analysis of Target Detection Performance on ENVISAT ASAR Alternating Polarization Mode

The ENVISAT ASAR can operate on Alternating Polarization (AP) mode, which can provide three different dual polarization combinations. This paper derives target detectors for three different dual polarization combinations. The detection performance is compared using ROC curve. The results indicate that the Polarimetric Whiting Filter (PWF) detector is the best detector which approaches the performance of the ideal Optimized Polarimetric Detector (OPD) and can improve the detection performance.