The high resolution radar target detection is addressed in the non-Gaussian clutter. An adaptive detector is derived for range-spread target based on a novel covariance matrix estimator. It is proved that the new detector is constant false alarm rate (CFAR) to both of the clutter covariance matrix structure and power level theoretically for match cases. The simulation results show that the new detector is almost CFAR for mismatch cases, and it outperforms the existing adaptive detector based on the sample covariance matrix. It also shows that the detection performance improves, as the number of pulses, the number of secondary data or the clutter spike increases. In addition, the derived detector is robust to different subsets, estimated clutter group sizes and correlations of clutter. Importantly, the number of iterations for practical application is just one.
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