Mitigation techniques for non-Gaussian sea clutter

This paper deals with the problem of coherent radar detection of targets embedded in clutter modeled as a compound-Gaussian process. We first provide a survey on clutter mitigation techniques with a particular emphasis on adaptive detection schemes ensuring the constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) property with respect to all of the clutter parameters. Thus, we propose a novel decision rule based on a recursive covariance estimator, which exploits the persymmetry property of the clutter covariance matrix. Remarkably, the devised receiver is fully CFAR in that its threshold can be set independently of the clutter distribution as well as of its covariance, even if the environment is highly heterogeneous; namely, the disturbance distributional parameters vary from cell to cell. At the analysis stage, we compare the performance of the novel detector with some classical radar receivers such as that of Kelly and the adaptive matched filter both in the presence of simulated as well as on real radar data, which statistical analysis has shown to be compatible with the compound-Gaussian model. The results show that the new receiving structure generally provides higher detection performance than the others and, for a fluctuating target, it uniformly outperforms the counterparts. We also provide a discussion on the CFAR behavior of the analyzed receivers as well as on their computational complexity.