Adaptive detection of targets on the sea surface based upon range-compressed SAR data

This paper addresses adaptive detection of possibly-extended targets on the sea surface based upon range-compressed SAR data. The detection problem has been re-cast in the context of space-time adaptive processing and an adaptive detector, capable to operate in uncertain scenarios, has been proposed. The proposed detector takes advantage of signature diversity, namely of the fact that possible useful signals from different range cells span a vector space whose dimension is greater than one. The performance assessment shows that it can be a viable means to cope with realistic scenarios.