The double threshold detecting strategy is widely used for spatially distributed target detection in practical systems. However, the detector is limited in terms of robustness and effectiveness. In this paper, an improved double threshold detector is proposed that avoids these shortcomings. In the proposed detector, the energy in range cells that exceed the first threshold is accumulated and then the output of the accumulator is compared with the second threshold for detection. The threshold selection strategy is derived to guarantee the constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) property. A simulation shows that the proposed detector is superior to the conventional approach in terms of both robustness and effectiveness.