Adaptive matched filter detection in spherically invariant noise

This work addresses radar detection of coherent pulse trains embedded in spherically invariant noise with unknown statistics. Starting upon a newly proposed detector, which assumes knowledge of the structure of the clutter covariance matrix, we substitute the actual matrix by a proper estimate based on a set of secondary data vectors. Interestingly, the resulting detector achieves constant false alarm rate with respect to the texture component of the clutter, and incurs an acceptable loss with respect to the case of known covariance matrix.