Robust radar detection of CA, GO and SO CFAR in Pearson measurements based on a non linear compression procedure for clutter reduction

Abstract

This paper deals with the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) radar detection of targets embedded in Pearson distributed clutter. We develop new CFAR detection algorithms-notably cell averaging (CA), greatest of selection (GO) and smallest of selection SO-CFAR operating in Pearson measurements based on a non-linear compression method for spiky clutter reduction. The technique is similar to that used in non uniform quantization where a different law is used. It consists of compressing the output square law detector noisy signal with respect to a non-linear law in order to reduce the effect of impulsive noise level. Thus, it can be used as a pre-processing step to improve the performance of automatic target detection especially in lower generalised signal-to-noise ratio (GSNR). The performance characteristics of the proposed CFAR detectors are presented for different values of the compression parameter. We demonstrate, via simulation results, that the pre-processed compression procedure is computationally efficient and can significantly enhance detection performance.