Performance deterioration of the matched filter detector in partially correlated texture based compound-Gaussian clutter environment

This paper addresses the problem of radar target detection in the presence of non-Gaussian clutter modeled in compound-Gaussian form which realizes the clutter process as a product of two independent random processes can be called as ldquotexturerdquo and ldquospecklerdquo. The existing matched filter (MF) detectors suit and are applicable to radar target detection in the presence of compound-Gaussian clutter. However, in view of scanning while detecting in a radar the textural component of the compound-Gaussian clutter exhibits a correlation which is less than unity. Therefore, it was needed to model the clutter in compound-Gaussian form considering partial correlation of texture and clutter modulation which arises as a result of antenna scanning. MF based detectors existing in the literature is expected to yield a fall in the detection performance in such clutter environment. Here in this paper, the performance of the existing MF detector is studied in detail for partially correlated texture scenario. Furthermore performance of the detector is mathematically analyzed to show its relationship with the texture correlation value. Analytical and simulation results show that for partially correlated texture the existing MF detector performance degrades significantly as compared to the completely correlated texture case.