On Efficiency of Detection of Subpixel Targets with Hypothesis Dependent Structured Background Power

Abstract

In this paper, matched detector (MD) and matched subspace detector (MSD) are studied when the structured background power is different under the null and the alternative hypotheses. The distributions of two test statistics are derived under these conditions. It has been analytically shown that these detectors can suffer a drastic degradation in performance for background power deviations under alternative hypothesis. We discuss the differences between the performances of these detectors in the case of the structured and unstructured backgrounds with uncorrelated Gaussian noise. The theoretical results are compared with simulated data and good agreement is reported. We present experimental results of small floating object detection on an agitated sea surface using spectral digital video experiments which validate the theoretical results.