Suboptimum approach to adaptive coherent radar detection in compound-Gaussian clutter

Adaptive detection of fluctuating radar targets in unknown correlated Gaussian clutter has received considerable attention in the past. On the other hand, the problem of adaptive detection in non-Gaussian environments is still under investigation. Adaptive coherent radar detection of Swerling I targets against compound-Gaussian clutter is addressed. Our contribution is (1) to present a detection algorithm, called the adaptive linear-quadratic (ALQ) detector, with constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) behavior with respect to the clutter amplitude probability density function (apdf) and that is quite insensitive to the clutter correlation structure, and (2) to investigate and compare the performance of the ALQ detector and Kelly´s generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) against K-distributed clutter