An approach based on influence function to evaluate robustness and detection performance of CFAR detectors

A method for evaluating both the robustness and detection performance of constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors is presented in this paper, which is based on the powerful methodology of influence function (IF) developed in the literature on robust statistics. The robustness of different kinds of CFAR detector can be evaluated and compared by calculating the first derivative of the false alarm probability (FAP) at an underlying distribution, which is named IF-FAP. From the analysis of IF-FAP, several conclusions are given here: the robustness of the detector can be asymptotically represented by the IF of the clutter power estimator, while the detection performance can be approximately evaluated by the asymptotic variance of the clutter power estimator which is an explicit functional of the corresponding IF.