Design of high-performance energy integrator detector for wideband radar

Target detection for wideband radar has recently received extensive attention. The classical energy integrating (EI) detector will always accumulate excess clutter or noise energy, which leads to unacceptable performance deterioration if the detection window is not selected properly. In this paper, an EI detector for the distributed targets in the Gaussian environment is proposed. First, at the stage of preparatory work, the target models are proposed, then, the problem formulation is introduced. Subsequently, in the aspect of optimizing the method of detection window search and the method of threshold setting, the detailed design stages of the proposed detector are provided. Furthermore, theoretical analyses show that the proposed detector is easy to hardware implementation, and it does not need the prior knowledge about the spatial distribution of the target scattering centers in practical radar detection application. Finally, the performance assessment conducted by Monte Carlo simulations verifies that the proposed detector outperforms the conventional detectors.