Direction detector for distributed targets in unknown noise and interference

Adaptive detection of distributed radar targets in homogeneous Gaussian noise plus subspace interference is addressed. It is assumed that the actual steering vectors lie along a fixed and unknown direction of a preassigned and known subspace, while interfering signals are supposed to belong to an unknown subspace, with directions possibly varying from one resolution cell to another. The resulting detection problem is formulated in the framework of statistical hypothesis testing and solved using an ad hoc algorithm strongly related to the generalised likelihood ratio test. A performance analysis, carried out also in comparison to natural benchmarks, is presented.