Adaptive detection of distributed targets with orthogonal rejection

This study deals with the problem of detecting distributed targets in the presence of homogeneous and partially homogeneous Gaussian disturbance with unknown covariance matrix. The proposed detectors improve the adaptive beamformer orthogonal rejection test (ABORT) idea to address detection of distributed targets, which makes it possible to decide whether some observations contain a useful target or a signal belonging to the orthogonal complement of the useful subspace. At the design stage, the authors resort to either the plain generalised likelihood ratio test (GLRT) or ad hoc design procedures. Remarkably, the considered criteria lead to receivers ensuring the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) property with respect to the unknown quantities. Moreover, authors´ derivations show that the ad hoc detector for a partially homogeneous environment coincides with the generalised adaptive subspace detector. The performance assessment conducted by Monte Carlo simulation has confirmed the effectiveness of the newly proposed detection algorithms.