New methods of radar detection performances analysis

Original methods of radar detection performance analysis are derived for a fluctuating or non-fluctuating target embedded in additive and a priori unknown noise. This kind of noise can be, for example, the sea or ground clutter encountered in surface-sited radar for the detection of a target illuminated at low grazing angles or in high resolution radar. For these cases, the spiky clutter tends to have a statistic which strongly differs from the gaussian assumption. Therefore, the detection theory becomes difficult to perform since the nature of the statistics has to be known. The new methods proposed here are based on the parametric modelisation of the moment generating function of the noise envelope by Pade approximation and lead to a powerful estimation of its probability density function. They allow to evaluate the radar detection performance of a target embedded in any noise without knowledge of the closed form of its statistic and allow in the same way to take into account any possible fluctuation of the target. These methods have been tested successfully on synthetic signals and have been performed on experimental signals such as ground clutter