Nowadays, piracy is a major issue and represents an important human and economic cost. Pirates commonly use small dinghies which can be hidden by sea-waves. These boats are therefore hardly visible for shipping vessels radars. Surprise effect is an important factor in attack successfulness. Radar technology can help to detect such threats. In order to improve actual radar systems, we investigate the impact of using a large antenna array on big vessel to build a MIMO radar.

This master thesis deals with foundations and signal modeling for near-field MIMO radar. The report focuses mainly on sea-clutter, signal modeling, polarization and the near-field MIMO possibilities. A complete naval radar model is implemented and allows to simulate small target detection.

Sea-clutter models results show that Tsallis-distribution models more accurately the sea-response amplitude than the commonly used K-distribution. Polarization results show that onboard weapons have a well defined polarimetric signature. However, unstable sea-clutter and boat responses hide this signature and makes it harder to detect. Results show that MIMO radar provides a large SCR gain compared to SIMO radar. MIMO radar outperforms SIMO radar small targets detection capacity on a rough sea.