A New CFAR Processor Based on Guard Cells Information

Abstract

Radar detection procedures involve the comparison of the received signal amplitude to a threshold. In order to obtain a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR), an adaptive threshold must be applied reflecting the local clutter situation. This paper presents an intelligent CFAR technique based on comparing the performance of five existing CFAR processors at different target and clutter situations. The proposed intelligent CFAR processor selects the adaptive threshold which is calculated by the best CFAR processor for certain environmental condition. The selection criterion based on comparing the information contained in the guard cells to those contained in test and window cells. This comparison is done to differentiate between single target, multiple targets, and clutter transition situations. Performance comparison through the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) is carried out to validate the superiority of the proposed CFAR technique at different target and clutter situations.

Performance Analysis of Improved Clutter-Map MTD Proces-sor for both Slowly & Tangential Moving Targets (STMT).

“…As the antenna needs to spend a certain time in each of these 'Mz' azimuth rays, a fixed number of pulses always returns from each of these 'P' rang cells. The number of returned pulses, NR, in each range azimuth cell may be calculated by [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

“…This adaptation of the threshold level leads to a form of constant false alarm rate (CFAR). Different CFAR schemes like Cell Average (CA) CFAR, Greatest-Of (GO) CFAR, Smallest-Of (SO) CFAR, or Order Statistic (OS) CFAR may be used to obtain a background estimate that is used for thresholding [19][20][21][22][23]. Detection performance of clutter map and thresholding detector depends on the background statistical characteristics and the design requirements [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”