Advanced Techniques of Radar Detection in Non-Gaussian Background

For several decades, the Gaussian assumption on the disturbance modeling in radar systems has been widely used to deal with detection problems. But, in modern high-resolution radar systems, the disturbance cannot be modelled as Gaussian distributed and the classical detectors suffer from high losses.
In this talk, after a brief description of modern statistical and spectral models for high-resolution clutter, coherent optimum and sub-optimum detectors, designed for such a background, will be presented and their performance analyzed against a non-Gaussian disturbance. Different interpretations of the various detectors are provided that highlight the relationships and the differences among them.
After this first part, some discussion will be dedicated to how to make adaptive the detectors, by incorporating a proper estimate of the disturbance covariance matrix. Recent works on Maximum Likelihood and robust covariance matrix estimation have proposed different approaches such as the Approximate ML (or Fixed-Point) Estimator or the M-estimators. These techniques allow to improve the detection performance in terms of false alarm regulation and detection gain in SNR.
Some of results with simulated and real recorded data will be shown.