Bayesian generalised likelihood ratio tests for distributed target detection in interference and noise

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of detecting a distributed target in interference and noise with low sample support. The target signal and interference lie in two linearly independent subspaces and the spectral property of the noise is unknown. The number of available training data is too small to form a non-singular sample covariance matrix. To overcome the difficulty, the authors resort to the Bayesian framework and design two generalised likelihood ratio tests. Both detectors can reduce training requirement by utilising the a prior knowledge of the noise covariance matrix. Numerical results show that the proposed detectors provide better detection performance than the conventional solutions in training-limited scenarios.