Non-coherent Integration Constant False Alarm Rate Detectors against K-distributed Sea Clutter for Coherent Radar Systems

The non-coherent integration detectors for coherent radar systems can promote the detection rate of the radar and meet the required real-time processing, however, these detectors are not Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) with respect to the reference cell number, the accumulated pulse number, the clutter speckle covariance matrix, and the shape parameter of the sea clutter model. Based on block-whitening method to whiten the sea clutter, a Pre-Whitening Cell-Averaging CFAR (PWCA-CFAR) detector and a Pre-Whitening Cell-Median CFAR (PWCM-CFAR) detector are proposed where the detection thresholds matching the reference cell number, accumulated pulse number and shape parameter are used. The experiment results show that the PWCM-CFAR detector attains better detection performance than the PWCA-CFAR detector when there exist abnormal cells.