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Circular-transmit/linear-receive compact polarimetry synthetic aperture radar systems combine coherent dual polarization with wide-swath imaging. The polarization information in these data may be represented as a Stokes vector, or one can reconstruct several quadpolarized covariance elements. Two reconstruction algorithms have been published in the literature: one by Souyris and a refined algorithm by Nord We investigated the application of these two algorithms for reconstructing ocean clutter for the purpose of detecting targets. We tested the assumptions underlying these algorithms and found that they were not valid for ocean scenes. We present a simple empirical reconstruction model whose reconstruction and target detection performance is superior to the two published algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]