Radar CFAR thresholding in heavy-tailed clutter and positive alpha-stable measurements

This paper shows how to apply Rohling´s (1983) order-statistics constant false alarm rate (OS CFAR) algorithm, developed for a Rayleigh background, to the case of heavy-tailed clutter background. In particular we study the performance of the OS CFAR processor when the output measurements of the square-law detector can be modeled as positive alpha stable (P/spl alpha/S) random variables with a shape parameter (characteristic exponent) equal to 0.5. We derive the exact expressions for the detection and false alarm probabilities of the OS and cell averaging (CA) CFAR detectors, and we compare their performance by means of their corresponding receiver operating characteristics.