Improved detection probability of a radar target in the presence of multipath with prior knowledge of the environment

A new method to address radar target detection problems in multipath environments is considered. The novelty of the proposed method is that it exploits prior knowledge on the environment and combines it with ray-tracing electromagnetic modelling to determine some information about the possible multipath structure. This information is used to separate the environment into different regions based upon the behaviour of the multipath components. Specifically, as a case study, the authors consider a radar and a target in the presence of a perfectly reflecting planar surface. For this environment, three regions are determined based on the amount of overlap among the multipath components. For each region, receivers are designed exploiting the multipath structure. Thus, a different viewpoint to analyse radar detection problems is suggested. The two main results are the improvement in the target probability of detection, by properly accounting for the multipath and a priori determination of the best performing detector based upon the location of the target and the available signal-to-noise ratio.