An Adaptive Radar Detection for the Target in Clutter with Unknown Covariance Based on the PPPT

In this paper we consider the problem of radar detect a fluctuating target in Gaussian clutter with unknown covariance. To this end we devise the detector based on the prior posterior ratio test (PPPT) criterion. The likelihood ratio is the prior-posterior PDF ratio of amplitude of the echo from the target. For the estimate of the unknown covariance of the clutter, We resort to the Maximum likelihood ration method, which means to minimize the posterior PDF of the amplitude of the echo. The simulation results show that the devised detector has a much better performance compared to the GLRT detector.