Performance of Conventional and LR Based Passive Radar Detectors in Ground Traffic Applications

Bistatic radar clutter can be characterized considering the Cross-Ambiguity Function (CAF) output as the observation space, for formulating the optimum Neyman-Pearson detector. In a previous study, a bank of Likelihood Ratio (LR) detectors was designed, but a basic passive radar solution composed of an incoherent Constant False Alarm Rate applied to the CAF intensity was used as reference. In this paper, the study is completed considering a widespread solution based on an Extensive CAncellation filter before CAF generation. Performances are estimated using real data acquired in a semi-urban scenario for the detection of ground targets. Estimated probabilities of detection and false alarm confirm the superior performance of the bank of LR filters compared to the basic and the new reference solutions.