Modified reference window for two-dimensional CFAR in radar target detection

Abstract

The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) technology plays an important role in radar target detection. In cell averaging CFAR detectors, a reference window is usually adopted to estimate the average interference power in the range–Doppler matrix and to obtain the detection threshold, which should be set high enough to limit false alarm rate to a tolerably small rate. The conventional rectangular window, cross window, and column window are investigated in this study, which may suffer from a degraded detection performance due to involving some extraneous reference cells. Therefore, a modified reference window for two-dimensional CFAR is proposed to improve performance, depending on the distribution characteristics of radar targets in range and Doppler dimensions. The experimental results demonstrate its performance advantages on detection probability, CFAR loss, and figure of merit.

Keywords

• doppler radar
• radar clutter
• radar detection
• matrix algebra
• probability
• object detection
• radar signal processing
• modified reference window
• two-dimensional cfar
• radar target detection
• constant false alarm rate technology
• cell averaging cfar detectors
• average interference power
• range–doppler matrix
• detection threshold
• tolerably small rate
• conventional rectangular window
• cross window
• column window
• degraded detection performance
• extraneous reference cells
• radar targets
• detection probability
• cfar loss