Ship Target Detection Using Distributed CFAR Detector with Multi-Radar System

Considering the great value of ship target detection and the outstanding detection performance with the multi-radar system, we apply a multi-radar distributed constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector based on the local test statistic (LTS) to address the ship target detection issue. As the prerequisite for applying the distributed detector, we design a joint search scenario. To achieve the spatial diversity gain produced by the multi-radar system, we proposed a SNR-exponentially-weighted (SEW) approach to fuse the LTSs that use an exponential function to calculate the weights assigned to the LTSs according to their signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. Numerical results show that, with an appropriate sensitivity parameter, the SEW fusion is sufficient for nearly optimum performance and outperforms the unweighted sum fusion, especially when some radars have SNRs that are moderate but obviously higher compared to other radars.