Target Detection in Heterogeneous Environments (2026)

Radar target detection requires effective clutter suppression, which is usually achieved by estimating the clutter covariance matrix using training data obtained from surrounding range gates to the cell under test (CUT). This requires that the training data be statistically homogeneous with the CUT. However, this assumption is usually violated in practice leading to significant degradation in performance. This talk will overview the problem and associated challenges of clutter suppression and target detection in heterogeneous environments. It will then focus on reduced rank detection approaches, particularly the multi-stage Wiener filter, discussing recent progress in achieving a constant false alarm rate implementation.