Target Detection within Nonhomogeneous Clutter via Total Bregman Divergence-Based Matrix Information Geometry Detectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel detection method based on total Bregman divergence within matrix information geometry, effectively identifying targets in complex nonhomogeneous clutter environments.

Contribution

It proposes the TBD-MIG detector framework, utilizing three new divergence-based detectors that improve discrimination and robustness over existing methods.

Findings

TBD-MIG detectors outperform geometric and adaptive matched filter detectors.

The proposed methods show high robustness to interference.

Simulations confirm superior detection performance in nonhomogeneous clutter.

Abstract

Information divergences are commonly used to measure the dissimilarity of two elements on a statistical manifold. Differentiable manifolds endowed with different divergences may possess different geometric properties, which can result in totally different performances in many practical applications. In this paper, we propose a total Bregman divergence-based matrix information geometry (TBD-MIG) detector and apply it to detect targets emerged into nonhomogeneous clutter. In particular, each sample data is assumed to be modeled as a Hermitian positive-definite (HPD) matrix and the clutter covariance matrix is estimated by the TBD mean of a set of secondary HPD matrices. We then reformulate the problem of signal detection as discriminating two points on the HPD matrix manifold. Three TBD-MIG detectors, referred to as the total square loss, the total log-determinant and the total von Neumann MIG detectors, are proposed, and they can achieve great performances due to their power of discrimination and robustness to interferences. Simulations show the advantage of the proposed TBD-MIG detectors in comparison with the geometric detector using an affine invariant Riemannian metric as well as the adaptive matched filter in nonhomogeneous clutter.