A novel detector of range-spread targets

The detection of the high-resolution radar (HRR) range- spread targets is studied in this paper and a novel method based on strong scattering centers for detecting range-spread targets in Gaussian clutter is proposed. The proposed detector has a two-threshold scheme. First of all, strong scattering centers of target are obtained by setting a first threshold with certain false alarm probability. And then, the detection statistic is formed based on generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), which is compared with the second threshold. The experimental results show that the proposed detector is better than the one out of N (1/N) detector, the spatial scattering density-GLRT (SDD-GLRT) detector and the integrator, and also show its robustness.