This paper deals with the design and the analysis of constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors exploiting knowledge-based (KB) processing techniques. The proposed algorithms are composed of two stages. The former is a KB data selector which, exploiting the a priori information provided by a geographic information system, chooses the training samples for threshold adaptation. The latter stage is a conventional CFAR processor. The performance of the new schemes is analysed in the presence of real radar data, collected by the McMaster IPIX radar, and compared with other common CFAR detectors. The results show that noticeable performance improvements can be obtained suitably exploiting the a priori information available about the sensed environment
Abstract-We address adaptive radar detection of targets embedded in ground clutter dominated environments characterized by a symmetrically structured power spectral density. At the design stage, we leverage on the spectrum symmetry for the interference to come up with decision schemes capable of capitalizing the a-priori information on the covariance structure. To this end, we prove that the detection problem at hand can be formulated in terms of real variables and, then, we apply design procedures relying on the GLRT, the Rao test, and the Wald test. Specifically, the estimates of the unknown parameters under the target presence hypothesis are obtained through an iterative optimization algorithm whose convergence and quality guarantee is thoroughly proved. The performance analysis, both on simulated and on real radar data, confirms the superiority of the considered architectures over their conventional counterparts which do not take advantage of the clutter spectral symmetry.
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