Performance Analysis of Two Adaptive Radar Detectors Against Non-Gaussian Real Sea Clutter Data

Adaptive radar detection in non-Gaussian clutter is the subject of this work. The performance of two adaptive detection schemes developed in the literature, Kelly's generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) and the adaptive linear-quadratic (ALQ) detector, are tested on real sea clutter data recorded by the IPIX experimental radar (McMaster University, Canada) at the Osborne Head Gunnery Range (OHGR) in November 1993. The results of first- and second-order statistical analyses performed on two data sets are reported. Amplitude analysis has been carried out by checking the fitting to Weibull, log-normal, K, and generalized K models. The results show good agreement between performance prediction based on the generalized K model, with texture strongly correlated among primary and secondary data, and the performance obtained by processing the real sea clutter data.