Adaptive False Alarmrm Regulation in Double Threshold Radar Detection

In practical situations the false alarm probability in double threshold radar detection, sometimes known as binary integration with sliding window detection, is dependent on the nonstationarity and azimuthal correlation of the clutter which is present. Control of the false alarm probability can be achieved, to a certain extent, by the adjustment of the second threshold in the detection process. In this study two adaptive control techniques which are based on the statistical characteristics of the data are compared. Comparing the results for a technique based on first-order statistics with one based on second-order statistics, it is shown that the second-order, or correlation sensitive, technique can give a reduction of 30 to 45 percent in the false alarm probability with no corresponding loss in the detection probability. An interesting aspect of the results is the fact that the effects of the size of the sample area and the bias in the correlation estimator are clearly evident.