Adaptive Radar Detection Using Two Sets of Training Data

This paper deals with adaptive radar detection of a point-like target in a homogeneous environment characterized by the presence of clutter, jamming, and radar internal noise. At the design stage, two training datasets, whose gathering is carefully motivated in the paper, are considered to get receiver adaptation. Hence, the maximum likelihood estimator of the interference covariance matrix for the cell under test is computed exploiting both the available secondary sets. This estimate is then used to build two adaptive decision rules based on the two-step generalized likelihood ratio test and Rao test criteria. Remarkably, they are not limited by the conventional constraint on the cardinality of the classic training dataset. At the analysis stage, the detection performances of the newly proposed detectors are compared with those of the analogous conventional counterparts and the interplay among the different parameters of the problem is thoroughly studied.