Distributed MIMO Radar Adaptive Detection in the Presence of Spectral Symmetry

We derive several parametric detectors for the case of a ground-based distributed multiple-input multiple-output radar system with colocated transmitters and receivers. The proposed detectors are based on exact and approximate generalized likelihood ratio tests. For the transmit–receive paths, which start and end at the same node, we incorporate the constraint of spectral symmetry, meaning that the clutter returns are assumed to have a power spectral density that is symmetric around the zero Doppler, which is motivated by statistical analyses performed on measured clutter radar data. Our numerical simulations suggest that the proposed parametric detectors, which incorporate the physics-based spectral symmetry constraint on clutter returns, achieve better performance than previously investigated parametric detection approaches which do not incorporate this constraint.