An adaptive weighted rank order detector for spatially distributed target

This paper addresses the problem of spatially distributed target detection in the Gaussian noise with single return. An order statistics based suboptimal detector, which is referred to as adaptive weighted rank order detector (AWROD), is proposed. The crucial characteristic of AWROD is that a prior knowledge of the number of the target scatterers is not required. Besides, the false alarm probability of AWROD is analyzed theoretically and the property of the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) is proved. Finally, the performance of AWROD is evaluated by simulation experiments. The numerical results show that the proposed detector outperforms several traditional spatially distributed target detectors.

► A novel detector (called adaptive weighted rank-order detector,AWROD) is proposed.
► The AWROD is used to detect spatially distributed target.
► The AWROD can reduce integration loss adaptively.
► The AWROD has the property of constant false alarm rate.