MIMO radar detection of targets in compound-Gaussian clutter

Abstract

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars with widely-separated transmitters and receivers are useful to discriminate a target from clutter using the spatial diversity of the scatterers in the illuminated scene. We consider the detection of targets in compound-Gaussian clutter fitting for example scatterers with heavy-tailed distributions for high-resolution and/or low-grazing-angle radars in the presence of sea or foliage clutter. First, we introduce a data model using the inverse gamma distribution to represent the clutter texture. Then, we apply the parameter-expanded expectation-maximization (PX-EM) algorithm to estimate the clutter texture and speckle, as well as the target parameters.We develop a generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) test target detector using the estimates and show the advantages of MIMO using Monte Carlo simulations.