Extended target detection of MIMO radar based on GLRT in compound-Gaussian clutter

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars with wideband signals are useful to discriminate target in clutter. With wideband MIMO radar, the problem of extended target detection in compound-Gaussian clutter is considered in this paper. By obtaining target echoes from each antenna, the detector based on generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) is developed. It shows that the shape parameter of clutter, Doppler mismatches and antenna configurations of MIMO radar heavily affect the performance of GLRT detector. Therefore, the detection performance is respectively analysed with different shape parameters and Doppler mismatches. By using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), the detection curves with typical parameters are presented to illustrate that the proposed detector outperforms that obtained in Gaussian clutter. Then, the detection performance is discussed with different antenna configurations. Mathematical analysis and simulation results show that the detection performance reaches the best when the numbers of transmitters and receivers are equal, which provides reference for the antenna configuration of MIMO radar.