A New Approach to Coherent Radar Detection in Non-Gaussian and Correlated Clutters

In this study, a general approach to the detection problem of unknown-amplitude coherent signals in some practical groups of non-Gaussian and/or correlated clutters is investigated. Since there exist no closed-form analytical probability distributions in these contributions, an optimal likelihood ratio test is not applicable and we instead utilize the characteristic function and its estimate in order to perform the estimation and detection. We also extend this idea to the case of correlated K-distributed clutter observations. We assess the performance of the proposed detectors and make some comparisons through Monte-Carlo simulations.