Innovative CFAR detector with effective parameter estimation method for generalised gamma distribution and iterative sliding window strategy

In high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the target size may be much larger than the resolution of SAR and the background clutter statistics are generally not Gaussian-distributed. But traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection algorithm, which based on the Gaussian-distributed model, performs only one test cell at a time and ignores the mutuality information with other cells in the target, so the performance of the CFAR detection algorithm can be substantially degraded. In the paper, an extend target detection method based on the generalized compound model is proposed. Unlike traditional CFAR detection method which distinguish test cell from the background only on the basis of energy contrast, the extend target detection is sensitive to both the contrast and the distribution of the target. We demonstrate the improved performance using the extend target detection method in the real high-resolution SAR images.

Linearly combined order statistic (LCOS) constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) detectors are examined for efficient and robust threshold estimation applied to exponentially distributed background observations for improved detection. Two optimization philosophies have been employed to determine the weighting coefficients of the order statistics. The first method optimizes the coefficients to obtain efficient estimates of clutter referred to the censored maximum likelihood (CML) and best linear unbiased (BLU) CFAR detectors. The second optimization involves maximizing the probability of detection under Swerling II targets and is referred to as the most powerful linear (MPL) CFAR detector. The BLU-CFAR detector assumes no knowledge of the target distribution in contrast to the MPL-CFAR detector which requires partial knowledge of the target distribution. The design of these CFAR detectors and the probability of detection performance are mathematically analyzed for background observations having homogeneous and heterogeneous distributions wherein the trade-offs between robustness and detection performance are illustrated. >

Target detection for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has great influence on the successive discrimination based on the target regions. However, as a pixel-based method, the traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection could not work well for the ship target detection problem of multiple ship targets with different sizes in a SAR image, which is referred to as the multiscale situation. Moreover, it needs to use the clustering method on the pixel-level detection results to obtain the accurate target regions, which may merge two or more different targets into a target region. In this letter, a modified CFAR based on object proposals is proposed. We use the object proposal generator to generate a small set of object proposals with different sizes, and then use the proposal-based CFAR detector, where the extracted object proposals are regarded as the guard windows instead of setting fixed guard window, to detect the true positive object proposals. By introducing the object proposals as the variable guard windows in the CFAR detector, the proposed algorithm could gain good detection performance in the multiscale situation, since the missed detection resulting from the big differences between the sizes of the fixed guard window and ship targets can be avoided. Meanwhile, the proposed method can directly obtain the accurate target regions. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified using the measured SAR data.

This paper develops a method to model the two parameter Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector as an intensity test. For optimality we show that the shape of the stencil should be matched to the radial intensity profile of the target. Using principal component analysis (PCA) we show experimentally that the first gamma kernel is a good approximation to the target profile, which explains the good results of the (gamma) -CFAR detector, and may lead to configurable stencils for better detectability.

Two novel constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors, the And-CFAR and Or-CFAR, are proposed, The two new CFAR detectors improve the conventional cell averaging CFAR (CA-CFAR) and order statistics CFAR (OS-CFAR) by making full use of the cell information. The novel CFAR processors combine the result of the CA-CFAR and OS-CFAR to get a better detection performance. In a homogeneous background, the mathematical medals of the two new CFAR detectors are derived and their performance has been evaluated and compared with that of CA-CFAR and OS-CFAR.

In this paper, we focus on the performance improvement of constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector in heterogeneous Compound-Gaussian background. This paper is motivated by the fact that the detectors' performance degradation when an unknown located clutter edge exists in the reference window that divide the data samples into two different independent and identically distributed (IID) Compound-Gaussian distribution. To account for this issue, we propose an automatic clutter edge estimation algorithm based on goodness of fit (GoF) which can select IID data with the cell under test (CUT), and we also suggest a CFAR detector (CFARD) uses this clutter edge estimation algorithm as preprocessing to enhance the detection performance around clutter edges. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed CFARD in comparison with Ordered-Statistic-CFARD (OS-CFARD).

In this paper, a new automatic and adaptive aircraft target detection algorithm in high-resolution airport synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed. Firstly, region segmentation is used to detect the apron area in the images, which provides the potential area where aircrafts may exist and reduce the search range. Secondly, upon the apron area the pre-segmentation is taken to label the possible target points. Thirdly, the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is improved to cope with multi-target detection situation. The clutter pixels in the sliding detection window will be removed automatically based on pre-segmentation result. As a result, more structural features of the targets are preserved. At last, in order to eliminate the detected false targets and solve the problem that the same target is divided into several disconnected areas, a new joint algorithm based on the area recognition factors and distance cluster is presented. The real airborne SAR image data of some airport is used to verify this target detection algorithm, and the result indicates that this algorithm can detect the aircraft target precisely and decrease the false alarm rate.

In this paper, we analyze the performance of distributed constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection with data fusion both in homogeneous and nonhomogeneous Gaussian backgrounds. We employ the ordered statistics (OS) CFAR detectors as local detectors. In the homogeneous background, we maximize the global probability of detection for a given fixed global probability of false alarm by optimizing both the threshold multipliers and the order numbers of the local OS-CFAR detectors. In the nonhomogeneous background with multiple targets or clutter edges, we analytically analyze the performance of the detection system and compare its performance with the performance of the distributed cell-averaging (CA) CFAR detection system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is a representative detection method for radar systems. Its detection performance is severely depending on clutter environments such as homogeneous and non-homogeneous. Depending on the environment, we have to adopt different CFAR algorithms. Thus, in this paper, we propose the environment detection algorithm using the Kalman filter. By using this algorithm, we can select the optimal CFAR detector for each environment.

This paper deals with the design and the analysis of constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors exploiting knowledge-based (KB) processing techniques. The proposed algorithms are composed of two stages. The former is a KB data selector which, exploiting the a-priori information provided by a geographic information system (GIS), chooses the training samples for threshold adaptation. The latter stage is a conventional CFAR processor. The performance of the new schemes are analysed in the presence of real radar data, collected by the McMaster IPIX radar, also in comparison with other common CFAR detectors. The results show that noticeable performance improvements can be obtained suitably exploiting the a-priori information available about the sensed environment.

We address the application of model-supported exploitation techniques to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The emphasis is on monitoring SAR imagery using wide area 2D and/or 3D site models along with contextual information. We consider here the following tasks useful in monitoring: (a) site model construction using segmentation and labeling techniques, (b) target detection, (c) target classification and indexing, and (d) SAR image-site model registration. The 2-D wide area site models used here for SAR image exploitation differ from typical site models developed for RADIUS applications, in that they do not model specific facilities, but constitute wide area site models of cultural features such as urban clutter areas, roads, clearings, fields, etc. These models may be derived directly from existing site models, possibly constructed from electro-optical (EO) observations. When such models are not available, a set of segmentation and labeling techniques described here can be used for the construction of 2D site models. The use of models can potentially yield critical information which can disambiguate target signatures in SAR images. We address registration of SAR and EO images to a common site model. Specific derivations are given for the case of registration within the RCDE platform. We suggest a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection scheme and a topographic primal sketch (TPS) based classification scheme for monitoring target occurrences in SAR images. The TPS of an observed target is matched against candidate targets TPSs synthesized for the preferred target orientation, inferred from context (e.g. road or parking lot targets). Experimental results on real and synthetic SAR images are provided.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the zlog(z) based estimator for constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection in Weibull clutter is proposed. This estimation method is obtained in terms of the digamma function where the estimates of the shape parameter are determined by the interpolation tool. The non-integer order moments estimator (NIOME) is also given and coincides the zlog(z) estimation results for low values of the moment’s fractional order. Via simulated data, it is shown that the CFAR detection performances based on the zlog(z) estimator have almost similar results as well as the existing maximum likelihood (ML) CFAR detector, but with low time-consuming which is very important in real-time applications.

Constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection techniques have been of much interest in radar and sonar applications. In this paper we consider CFAR detection in a decentralized, multisensor context and show some interesting characteristics of cell averaging (CA) in this setting. We investigate cases with observations which are dependent from sensor to sensor, for which results have been lacking. The in-phase and quadrature components of the received narrowband observation at each sensor consist of a weak random signal in additive clutter and noise. Each sensor transmits a single binary decision to a fusion center which uses either an AND or an OR fusion rule to develop a final decision. The forms of the best sensor detector rules are found and a set of necessary conditions are given for their thresholds. Solutions are obtained for some representative cases and their detection probability performance is studied. Their ability to maintain constant false alarm probability in the face of clutter edges is also studied. We show that solutions which use different fusion rules may excel for each of these different criteria.

In this paper, a reduced-rank multistage Wiener filter based constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is applied for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio. Spectrum sensing is an essential component in cognitive radio. In order to enhance the performance of primary user signal detection under the multipath fading environment, a multiple antenna technique is employed at the secondary user. In addition, the general sidelode canceller (GSC) is utilized prior to the detection to suppress the effect of interference and noise. And then the adaptive matched filter (AMF) CFAR detector is employed for the secondary user. For the purpose of reduction in computational complexity and reliable performance, reduced-rank processing is a well-known technique under the condition of finite sample support in short sensing time. Numerical results show that the reduced-rank multistage Wiener filter based AMF CFAR detector outperforms the full-rank filter.

MLP-CFAR for improving coherent radar detectors robustness in variable scenarios