PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF ADAPTIVE DETECTION OF RADAR TARGET IN AN INTERFERENCE SATURATED ENVIRONMENT

An interference saturated environment is one of the oper- ating conditions that drastically degrades the detection performance of the radar signal processor.Such an environment is frequently encoun- tered in radar applications (multitarget situation).In this type of op- erating environments, the presence of outlying target returns amongst the elements of the reference set raises the detection threshold and this causes the detection performance of the adaptive signal processor to be degraded.In order to improve the processor performance in this situa- tion, it is necessary to prevent these interfering target returns from the contribution to the noise power estimation for this estimation to rep- resent the actual background noise level.To achieve this requirement, the double-threshold (DT) scheme has been introduced.The function of the first threshold is to ensure that the reference channels are not contaminated with outlying target returns and hence the calculation of the detection (second) threshold is based on a set of samples which is free of strong interferers and is therefore much more representative of the noise level.To further improve the multitarget detection per- formance of DT processor, it is of importance to supplement the radar receiver with a video integrator to noncoherently integrate M of the returned pulses from the target.Our goal in this research is to ana- lyze the multipulse detection performance of such type of CFAR radar target detection techniques when it operates in an interference satu- rated environment.A χ 2 family of fluctuating targets with an integer fluctuation parameter is employed as a model for the received signal. Our numerical results are focused on the important Swerling case II model because of the prevalence of frequency diversity between nonco- herent pulse bursts.It was found that the degradation in the processor performance caused by outliers is quite small even if their number is large given that the discarding threshold is properly selected.For fixed