The improved constant false alarm rate detector based on multi‐frame integration for fluctuating target detection in heavy‐tailed clutter

Abstract In this paper, attention is devoted to the analysis of the detection threshold based on the multi‐frame integration in heavy‐tailed clutter for the radar with high resolution and even smaller grazing angle. The closed‐form expressions of both the probability of the detection and the probability of false alarm for the heavy‐tailed clutter background, which can be used for the theoretical analysis of constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors, are derived with the multi‐frame integration technique. Accordingly, an improved CFAR detector is designed to work well with the presence of target‐like outliers in the heavy‐tailed clutter. In addition, the proposed CFAR detector is capable to alleviate the masking‐effect resorting to the additive feedback operation when a target is large enough to cross several cells in multi‐target case. The theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed CFAR detector based on multi‐frame integration can improve the signal‐to‐clutter rate of the targets exhibiting better performance than ones based on single frame in heavy‐tailed clutter background. It is validated from the simulations that the proposed CFAR detector with additive feedback operation can deal with masking‐effect for large target occupying several cells.