Owing to the Doppler frequency migration of the return signal of maneuvering targets and finite training samples, it is difficult to detect maneuvering targets by conventional Adaptive Matched Filter (AMF) detectors. To solve this problem, a new method is proposed. First, to minimize sample size impairments, the diagonal loading technique was adopted to decrease the degrees of freedom of the sample space. Second, the Doppler frequency migration was compensated by the estimated acceleration which was estimated by the cubic phase transform, so as to reduce the dimension of matched searching and degrade the heavy calculation load. Finally, accumulation detection was conducted. The simulation results suggest that the proposed method can efficiently detect maneuvering target in finite sample situations with simple computation and constant false alarm rate detection.

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (61471365, 61231017, 61571442), National University’s Basic Research Foundation of China (3122015B002), Foundation for Sky Young Scholars of Civil Aviation University of China