Cornish-Fisher technique for estimating detection probabilities for compound clutter distributions

Application of the Cornish-Fisher technique for the calculation of statistical quantiles to the central moment expansion of the radar detection problem for general non- Rayleigh compound sea clutter distributions yields simple and explicit representations of the detection probability as a function of system and operational parameters. The domain of airborne maritime radar is considered, and the method is illustrated for the case of a Swerling-2 target in K-distributed clutter, where the evaluation of detection curves turns out to be not significantly more computationally expensive than the corresponding Rayleigh-distributed problem. This makes it well suited to operational studies based on computer simulation.