Automatic censored cell averaging CFAR detector in nonhomogeneous clutter

In a real radar environment, the presence of clutter power transitions in the range resolution cells of a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector may cause an excessive number of false alarms or impaired target detectability depending on whether the cell under test is in the clutter or in the clear region, respectively. The authors propose an adaptive censoring algorithm which performs cell-by-cell tests to censor the unwanted samples, but does not rank order the reference observations. In addition, the proposed detector which is referred to as the automatic censored cell averaging (ACCA) CFAR detector is designed to be robust when more than one clutter power transition occurs in the reference window