  This paper proposes a novel approach to robust radar detection of
range-spread targets embedded in Gaussian noise with unknown covariance matrix.
The idea is to model the useful target echo in each range cell as the sum of a
coherent signal plus a random component that makes the signal-plus-noise
hypothesis more plausible in presence of mismatches. Moreover, an unknown power
of the random components, to be estimated from the observables, is inserted to
optimize the performance when the mismatch is absent. The generalized
likelihood ratio test (GLRT) for the problem at hand is considered. In
addition, a new parametric detector that encompasses the GLRT as a special case
is also introduced and assessed. The performance assessment shows the
effectiveness of the idea also in comparison to natural competitors.
