New CFAR stencil for target detections in synthetic aperture radar imagery

The two-parameter constant false rate (CFAR) detector defines a local area where the shape and scale of the stencil are predetermined by physical considerations alone (target size) which may cause suboptimal performance of the detector in SAR imagery. In this paper, we propose a new CFAR stencil based on a family of gamma kernels which provide the ability of adapting the scale and shape of the stencil to offer the minimum false alarm, The new detector is called the gamma CFAR detector. The simulation results show that the gamma CFAR detector outperforms the tow- parameter CFAR detector in high-resolution, 1 ft. by 1 ft., fully polarimetric SAR imagery processed by the polarimetric whitening filter.