Detection of radar targets using HOS

The application of higher-order statistics (HOS) to the detection of radar targets takes advantage of the HOS characteristic that allows the test statistics to be unbiased by Gaussian noise. To make use of this characteristic using data from a coherent radar, the samples from the radar´s synchronous detector are coherently averaged in a formulation of the triple correlation. The HOS method is compared to the classical pulse Doppler method and the quadratic detector. For the examples given, the HOS method shows a one to two dB improvement over classical methods.