M-sweeps detection analysis of cell-averaging CFAR processors in multiple-target situations

The performances of the conventional cell-averaging (CA), greatest-of (GO) and smallest-of (SO) constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors are analysed for the case where one or more interfering target returns are present in the set of cells used in estimating the clutter-plus-noise level. Exact expressions are derived for the detection probability of these detectors when noncoherent integration is used under the chi-square target fluctuation model. Results are depicted for a Swerling I target model. As M increases, better performances are obtained for the CA, GO and SO detectors under both homogeneous and nonhomogeneous background models. For the same parameters, the SO scheme gives the best performance in the case of a multiple-target environment