Distributed Target Detection in Unknown Interference

Interference can degrade the detection performance of a radar system. To overcome the difficulty of target detection in unknown interference, in this paper we model the interference belonging to a subspace orthogonal to the signal subspace. We design three effective detectors for distributed target detection in unknown interference by adopting the criteria of the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), the Rao test, and the Wald test. At the stage of performance evaluation, we illustrate the detection performance of the proposed detectors in the presence of completely unknown interference (not constrained to lie in the above subspace). Numerical examples indicate that the proposed GLRT and Wald test can provide better detection performance than the existing detectors.