A review of CFAR detection techniques in radar systems

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the problem of achieving constant false alarm rate (CFAR) operation in radar systems and the techniques used for this purpose. First, the characteristics of non-coherent clutter in both space and time domains are assessed. Attention is then focused on the two main approaches to CFAR detection, spatial adaptive thresholding and temporal adaptive thresholding. For each approach, a number of currently used techniques are reviewed. Performance evaluation and comparison between the two classes of de vices also are considered. Other CFAR techniques based on coherent processing are outlined and discussed.