Abstract:

The high resolution radar target detection is addressed
in the non-Gaussian clutter. An adaptive detector is derived for
range-spread target based on a novel covariance matrix estimator.
It is proved that the new detector is constant false alarm rate
(CFAR) to both of the clutter covariance matrix structure and power
level theoretically for match cases. The simulation results show
that the new detector is almost CFAR for mismatch cases, and it
outperforms the existing adaptive detector based on the sample
covariance matrix. It also shows that the detection performance
improves, as the number of pulses, the number of secondary data
or the clutter spike increases. In addition, the derived detector is
robust to different subsets, estimated clutter group sizes and correlations
of clutter. Importantly, the number of iterations for practical
application is just one.

Key words: non-Gaussian clutter, adaptive detection, rangespread
target, performance assessment.