Adaptive detector design of MIMO radar with unknown covariance matrix

The problem of detecting signal with multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar in correlated Gaussian clutter dominated scenario with unknown covariance matrix is dealt with. The general MIMO model, with widely separated sub-arrays and co-located antennas at each sub-array, is adopted. Firstly, the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) with known covariance matrix is obtained, and then the Rao and Wald detectors are devised, which have proved that the Rao and Wald test coincide with GLRT detector. To make the detectors fully adaptive, the secondary data with signal-free will be collected to estimate the covariance. The performance of the proposed detector is analyzed, however, it is just ancillary. A thorough performance assessment by several numerical examples is also given, which has considered the sense with co-located antennas configure of transmitters and receivers array. The results show that the performance the proposed adaptive detector is better than LJ-GLRT, and the loss can be acceptable in comparison to their non-adaptive counterparts.