CFAR behavior of adaptive detectors: an experimental analysis

In this paper we perform an experimental analysis for assessing the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) behavior or four coherent adaptive radar detectors in the presence of experimentally measured clutter data. To this end we exploit several data files containing both land and lake clutter, collected by two radar systems (the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Phase-One radar and the McMaster IPIX radar) at different polarizations, range resolutions, and frequency bands. The results show that all the receivers, in the presence of real data, do not respect their nominal probability of false alarm (P_fa) namely they exhibit a false alarm rate higher than the value preassigned at the design stage. Nevertheless one of them, the recursive persymmetric adaptive normalized matched filter (RPANMF) is very robust, in the sense that it presents an acceptable displacement from the nominal P_fa, in correspondence of all the analyzed scenarios.