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www.ietdl.orgA radar system is to reliably detect targets under the interference of noise, clutter and jamming. The detection problem becomes further challenging when the strength of the interfering signal and its statistical properties are not known a priori. For such problems, the interference has to be estimated during the operation and the detector has to operate with the imperfect characterisation of the interfering signal. Such target detectors are called adaptive target detectors [1, 2]. Following the seminal work of Kelly [2], a number of adaptive radar detection techniques have been proposed [3–6]. Especially for the applications with non-stationary clutter, as in the airborne radar applications, the usage of adaptive detectors havs found much success [7, 8]. Different from the conventional detection techniques