Component Distributions for Fluctuating Radar Targets

The paper describes a technique whereby with each physical model for fluctuating radar targets is associated a standard model and a mathematical model. All three models have radar cross section distributions and certain properties of component independence in common. A wide selection of mathematical models hence becomes available as a tool for analyzing physical target models. It is shown that the mathematical model can be represented by a quadratic form involving generalized Bessel and Gaussian components. The probability distribution of the quadratic form is derived and expressed in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions. The authors also derive the related pulse-train probability distributions for two pulse integration schemes using either scan-to-scan or pulse-to-pulse amplitude independence.