A wavelet smoothing CFAR processor

Characteristics of airborne high grazing angle high resolution X-band sea clutter, collected by the DSTOpsilas Ingara system, are presented. Upper and lower boundary distributions of multi-look K-distributed data are discussed. A wavelet smoothing (WS) technique is proposed for estimating the local mean. Unlike other constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) schemes, such as cell-average (CA) and its variants, which inherently produce CFAR loss, the proposed WS-CFAR scheme is always able to generate CFAR gains, even for uncorrelated data. When tested with the correlated sea clutter, WS-CFAR outperforms CA-CFAR and provides CFAR gains of 1 to 3 dB at the false-alarm rate of 10^-4 to 10^-5.