Assessing detector performance, with application to Pareto coherent multilook radar detection

A necessary and sufficient condition is established, which can be used to compare the performance of two radar detection schemes. This means that the performance of detectors can be measured relative to a benchmark detector. In the context of coherent multilook detection in a Pareto clutter environment, the whitening matched filter (WMF) detector, which is optimal for Gaussian clutter, has been observed to perform very well as a suboptimal detector. Based upon this, variations of the WMF are constructed and analysed.