COMPARISON OF PASSIVE RADAR DETECTORS WITH NOISY REFERENCE SIGNAL

Traditional passive radar systems with a noisy reference signal use the cross-correlation statistic for detection. However, owing to the composite nature of this hypothesis testing problem, no claims can be made about the optimality of this detector. Therefore, exploiting the low-rank structure of most passive radar illuminators, we recently proposed singular value decomposition based detectors that outperform the CC detector. In this paper, we derive the generalized likelihood ratio tests for this signal model and compare with our proposed SVD based detectors. We demonstrate the near CFAR behavior (highly desirable) of our SVD detectors. We show that on the other hand, the GLRT detectors have a varying probability of false alarm with changing reference channel characteristics making it impractical to use them in a passive radar system.