In radar target detection, constant false alarm rate (CFAR), which stands for the adaptive threshold adjustment with variation of clutter to maintain the constant probability of false alarm during the detection, plays an important role. Matrix CFAR detection performed on the manifold of Hermitian positive-definite (HPD) covariance matrices is an efficient detection method that is based on information geometry. However, the HPD covariance matrix, which is constructed by a small bunch of pulses, describes the correlations among received data and suffers from severe information redundancy that limits the improvement of detection performance. This paper proposes a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based matrix CFAR detection method for dealing with the point target detection problems in clutter. The proposed method can not only reduce dimensionality of HPD covariance matrix, but also reduce the redundant information and enhance the distinguishability between target and clutter. We first apply PCA to the cell under test, and construct a transformation matrix to map higher-dimensional matrix space to a lower-dimensional matrix space. Subsequently, the corresponding detection statistics and detection decision on matrix manifold are derived. Meanwhile, the corresponding signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) is improved. Finally, the simulation experiment and real sea clutter data experiment show that the proposed method can achieve a better detection performance.
Keywords: HPD matrix manifold; PCA; information redundancy reduction; matrix CFAR detection; target detection.