CFAR techniques for over-the-horizon radar

Since the OTHR background noise is too strong, the target echoes would be embedded in sea clutter and environment noise. In order to detect targets such as ships or aircrafts from radar returns, a range Doppler CFAR schemes is presented, the identical Doppler frequency resolution cells over adjacent range or azimuth resolution cells are used to form a sliding window for targets detection. Since the OTHR range resolution cells is very large and so do the azimuth resolution cells, the total number of range Doppler resolution cells that forms sliding window is limited in order to guarantee stationary. Some CFAR algorithms such as CA, CM, TM, BLU and QBW methods that are suitable for OTHR are compared and analyzed versus different total range or azimuth resolution cells number. If the total range Doppler resolution cells number is small (less than 12), CA-CFAR is preferred in order to get the good detection performance. In multiple targets situation, CM-CFAR or TM-CFAR are suggested which trims the largest samples that possibly be interfering targets.