The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) process is essential for target detection in radar systems. Although the detection performance of the CFAR process is normally guaranteed in noise-limited environments, it may be dramatically degraded in clutter-limited environments since the probabilistic characteristics for clutter are unknown. Therefore, sophisticated CFAR processes that suppress the effect of clutter can be used in actual applications. However, these methods have the fundamental limitation of detection performance because there is no feedback structure in terms of the probability of false alarm for determining the detection threshold. This paper presents a robust control scheme for adjusting the detection threshold of the CFAR process while estimating the clutter measurement density (CMD) that uses only the measurement sets over a finite time interval in order to adapt to time-varying cluttered environments, and the probability of target existence with finite measurement sets required for estimating CMD is derived. The improved performance of the proposed method was verified by simulation experiments for heterogeneous situations.
Keywords: CFAR process; clutter measurement density; probability of target existence; robust control.