In radar detection, the presence of clutter is an undesirable but unavoidable fact. Furthermore, clutter is highly destructive to the detection of slow-fluctuating targets, since Doppler filtering can not be adapted when clutter and targets are moving at approximately the same speed. Besides, to face improvements of countermeasure means (absorbent materials, structure geometry, etc.), the setting up of high performance detection schemes is mandatory. Radar polarimetry indicates to provide the long sought-for solution to these problems. The goal of this research is to estimate the contribution of polarimetry to radar detection by evaluating several novel polarimetric detection algorithms and by comparing them to existing coherent single channel-only approaches.