A Segmentation-Based CFAR Detector With Spatial Continuity Constraint in Nonhomogeneous Weather Clutter

The performance of conventional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors may degrade in nonhomogeneous clutter environments, as accurately estimating the clutter distribution in the cell under test (CUT) using reference cells becomes challenging. In this article, a CFAR detector based on clutter segmentation with spatial continuity constraints is proposed for target detection within nonhomogeneous weather clutter backgrounds. Analysis of real weather clutter collected by a high-resolution phased array radar indicates that the Rayleigh mixture model can precisely characterize the amplitude distribution of nonhomogeneous weather clutter in spatial domain. The hidden Markov random field model is employed to capture the spatial correlation of weather clutter. Based on this model, clutter segmentation is implemented using the variational expectation-maximization algorithm, which provides the posterior class of clutter in each range cell and the estimated parameter of each class. Simulation results indicate that introducing the spatial continuity improves the accuracy of clutter segmentation and parameter estimation. A CFAR detection scheme is proposed, which utilizes the segmentation results to estimate the clutter distribution of the CUT and set the detection threshold accordingly. Experiments conducted using both simulated data and real weather clutter have demonstrated that the proposed method improves detection performance. The proposed method exhibit a maximum increase in detection probability of 8.97% compared to the best-performing benchmark method when the false alarm rate is $10^{-6}$ in real weather clutter.