Performance of the locally optimum detector in a correlated non-Gaussian disturbance

The problem of detecting radar signals embedded in clutter is considered. In radar problems involving weak signal detection conventional space-time processing cannot be used to separate the target from the clutter when the spatial and Doppler spectra of the target and clutter overlap. In such problems the concept of the locally optimum detector (LOD) is useful in coming up with a decision rule to discriminate between the two hypotheses of signal present or signal absent. The clutter which may be correlated can arise from either a non-Gaussian or Gaussian random process. For correlated multivariate student-T distributed clutter it is shown in that significant performance improvements can be obtained with a LOD as opposed to the conventional Gaussian linear receiver