Persymmetric detectors of distributed targets in partially homogeneous disturbance

•Two detectors based on the Rao and Wald tests are devised.•The disturbance has unknown but persymmetric structured covariance matrix.•The proposed detectors achieve matched detection performance improvement.

This paper deals with the problem of detecting distributed target in Gaussian disturbance with unknown but persymmetric structured covariance matrix. The partially-homogeneous environment is considered and two receivers based on the Rao test and the Wald test design criteria are derived at the design stage. The performance assessment conducted by resorting to both simulated data and real data, also in comparison to the previously proposed detectors, has confirmed the effectiveness of the newly proposed detectors.