Double-step fast CFAR scheme for multiple target detection in high resolution SAR images

A new double-step fast CFAR scheme is proposed for multiple target detection in SAR images. The conventional multiple-cell based CFAR (MC-CFAR) detector is performed to find a potential target area. MC-CFAR carries out a quick search by which the CFAR sliding window is shifted by several cells for the reduced computational loads and it can also effectively reduce the small sized false alarm in the vicinity of the test cell. For the final target decision, the single-cell based CFAR detection is only applied to the pre-processed potential target areas. Using real-SAR image, the proposed CFAR scheme is compared with the conventional method in the sense of computational time and false alarm rate, which shows the faster computational speed and the lower false alarm rate.