Research on a New Comprehensive CFAR (Comp-CFAR) Processing Method

Since the clutter statistics of marine radar are non-stationary and difficult to ascertain, the constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) processor based on some clutter statistical characteristics is hard to obtain the CFAR performance. Especially, for clutter with long smearing effect characteristics, such as lognormal distribution, Pareto distribution, and K distribution, it is difficult to obtain CFAR characteristics using conventional CFAR processing techniques. The main consideration of this paper is to improve the robustness of CFAR, and the Comp-CFAR method is proposed according to the central limit theorem and the logarithmic compression principle of the signal. This method mainly includes clutter two-parameter logarithmic compression processing and accumulation of the magnitudes' average comprehensive CFAR processing. The experimental verification of CFAR characteristics and target detection performance with CFAR in four typical clutter environments shows that this method has better detection ability compared with the NCI-CFAR.