Asymptotic performance of the Low Rank Adaptive Normalized Matched Filter in a large dimensional regime

The paper addresses the problem of approximating the detector distribution used in target detection embedded in a disturbance composed of a low rank Gaussian noise and a white Gaussian noise. In this context, it is interesting to use an adaptive version of the Low Rank Normalized Matched Filter (LR-ANMF) detector, which is a function of the estimated projector onto the low rank noise subspace. We will show that the traditional approximation of the LR-ANMF detector distribution is not always the better one. In this paper, we propose to perform its limits when the number of secondary data K and the data dimension m both tend to infinity at the same rate m/K → c∈2 (0;∞). Then, we give the theoretical distributions of these limits in the large dimensional regime and approximate the LR-ANMF detector distribution by them. The comparison of empirical and theoretical distributions on a jamming application shows the interest of our approach.