Analysis of the generalized order statistics constant false alarm rate detector

Abstract

In this paper, we present an architecture of the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector called the generalized order statistics (GOS) CFAR detector, which covers various order statistics (OS) and cell-averaging (CA) CFAR detectors as special cases. For the proposed GOS CFAR detector, we obtain unified formulas for the false alarm and detection probabilities. By properly choosing coefficients of the GOS CFAR detector, one can utilize any combination of ordered samples to estimate the background noise level. Thus, if we use a reference window of size N, we can realize (2 - 1) kinds of CFAR processors and obtain their performances from the unified formulas. Some examples are the CA, the OS, the censored mean level, and the trimmed mean CFAR detectors. As an application of the GOS CFAR detector to multiple target detection, we propose an algorithm called the adaptive mean level detector, which censors adaptively the interfering target returns in a reference window.