Abstract:

In a coherent radar system,compared with the coherent integration detectors,non-coherent integration detectors with fast implementation can meet the demand of real-time processing,and are of great significance in practical applications.However,these detectors do not have a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) with respect to the integrated pulse number,the number of reference cells,the shape parameter of the sea clutter model,and the speckle covariance matrix of the sea clutter.In order to realize fast CFAR detection of moving targets in sea clutter amplitude distribution with a log-normal texture,this paper proposes a detection method of speckle whitening followed by non-coherent integration,which is CFAR with respect to the scale parameter and speckle covariance matrix of the sea clutter.Moreover,it is also analyzed how the power integration and amplitude integration are to affect detection performance.By using the decision thresholds matching to the clutter shape parameter,the integrated pulse number,and the number of reference cells,the CFAR characteristic of the proposed detection method can be ensured,and then the proposed detector can implement a large-scene fast detection of maritime radars.Experiments show that the amplitude integration behaves better than the power integration and the speckle whitening before the integration wholly improves the signal-to-clutter ratios of moving targets,and that it can also bring a significant performance improvement for the high-speed moving target.

Key words: compound Gaussian clutter with log-normal texture, non-coherent integration detectors, constant false alarm rate, sea clutter, speckle whitening