Multiple pulse detection in distributed Rayleigh clutter

This paper studies the Neyman-Pearson discrete-time detector for multiple pulse phase/amplitude coded radar signals in the presence of spatially white distributed Rayleigh clutter. The detector is shown to be an inner-product computer (not the usual correlator), followed by an envelope detector. In other words, the optimum detector for the distributed clutter case is not a moving target detector (MTD) plus matched filter. Interesting properties are presented, namely extremely low range time sidelobes in the ambiguity diagram and the concept of oversampling. Oversampling allows one to substantially improve clutter rejection for situations of high clutter to noise ratio. Finally, the performance of the optimum detector is compared to that of the correlator plus MTD demonstrating the potential performance improvement of the optimum detector