Order‐statistic‐based sub‐band detector for range distributed target

Current range distributed target detectors use idealised primary data, which incorporates all the scattering centres of target without additional noise‐only range cells beyond the target's boundaries. In practical applications, primary data are extracted by preliminaries (sliding window method, for example), which may cause the loss of target energy and the degradation of detectors' performance. To overcome the problem, this paper resorts to the principles of frequency agility and devises an order‐statistic‐based sub‐band detector (OS‐SD) without preliminaries to extract primary data. OS‐SD assumes no a priori knowledge about the structure of the distributed target. Its design guarantees the bounded constant alarm false rate (bounded CFAR) property. The performance assessment conducted by Monte Carlo simulations confirms the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed detector.