Robust distributed detection fusion scheme under unknown time-variant signal-to-clutter ratio conditions

A censored summation based weighted fusion scheme (CSWF) for multiradar distributed detection systems is presented to improve the detection probability of the fusion center where final decision is made by using the generalized sign test statistics (GSTS) formed and sent by every radar. It incorporates the direct summation fusion (DSF) and all kinds of the censored summation fusions (CSF) and regulates their relative importance by a weight vector. If any of them declares the presence of a target, the CSWF will accept it. The DSF fuses all the GSTSs by adding up them, while the CSF only adds up the remainder after discarding some of them. Under unknown time-variant signal-to-clutter ratio conditions, the result shows that the DSF and CSF can not always perform well and even have very poor detection performance; conversely, the CSWF has a quite good performance and behaves at least the second best among the three schemes. The CSWF is robust and high-performance.