An Investigation of CFAR Techniques for Airborne Radars

Abstract

In this report, techniques for performing constant false alarm rate (CFAR) processing, with airborne pulse-Doppler radars are described. Cell-averaging, greatest-of, and smallest-of CFAR processors are implemented on interference environments of thermal noise, and thermal noise plus clutter. For the particular radar conditions considered, a 60 dB clutter peak appears across all of the range gates. While these three processors were successful in the thermal noise environment, they suffered large CFAR losses in the presence of the clutter peak. The smallest-of CFAR algorithm performed much worse than the other two, due to its tendency to underestimate the interference powers. Although enlarging the reference window improves the performance of all the processors, it is clear that for the complicated clutter situation examined, more sophisticated CFAR techniques are required. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA232724

Entities

People

  • Denis Faubert
  • Gary E. Vrckovnik

Organizations

  • Defence Research and Development Canada

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Airborne
  • Algorithms
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Distribution Functions
  • Doppler Radar
  • False Alarms
  • Frequency
  • Geometry
  • Ground Clutter
  • Radar
  • Simulators
  • Statistics
  • Target Detection
  • Two Dimensional
  • Warning Systems

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Radar Systems Engineering.
  • Systems Analysis and Design