Adaptive Detection and Range Estimation of Point-Like Targets with Symmetric Spectrum

In this letter, we address adaptive radar detection of point-like targets in Gaussian clutter with an unknown covariance matrix. To this end, we first exploit the symmetrically structured power spectral density of the clutter to transfer data from the complex to the real domain. Then, the spillover of target energy is incorporated into the design criteria to come up with two architectures capable of guaranteeing improved detection performances and range estimation. The performance assessments, conducted on both simulated data and real recorded datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly proposed detectors compared with the state-of-the-art counterparts, which ignore either the clutter spectral symmetry or the energy spillover.