Towards a theory of submarine mast detection

Complex radar targets are often modelled as a number of individual scattering elements randomly distributed throughout the spatial region containing the targets. A common assumption in this case requires independent scatterers with a uniformly distributed phase. Asymptotically, this leads to a Gaussian distribution of the scattered signal or a Rayleigh distributed Radar Cross Section (RCS). However, a class of problems exists where the target must be modelled as a random scatterer and the number of scatterers is not large enough to safely apply the Large Numbers Theorem. One such problem is the detection of submarine masts in a clutter. Here we consider an alternative approach to describe the statistics of the RCS based on deterministic target response modelling and a statistical description of the target movement.