The heavy tailed distribution of a common CFAR detector

Paul Frank Singer; Doreen M. Sasaki

doi:10.1117/12.217699

1 September 1995 The heavy-tailed distribution of a common CFAR detector

Paul Frank Singer, Doreen M. Sasaki

Proceedings Volume 2561, Signal and Data Processing of Small Targets 1995; (1995) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.217699
Event: SPIE's 1995 International Symposium on Optical Science, Engineering, and Instrumentation, 1995, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

A CFAR detector commonly used for the detection of unresolved targets normalizes the background variance by dividing the detection filter output by the local sample standard deviation. A number of researchers have measured the experimental false alarm probability of this detector and found it to be higher than the probability predicted by a Gaussian density function. This is the case even when the filter output statistics are known to be Gaussian distributed. A number of attempts have been made to heuristically construct distributions which exhibit the heavy tails associated with the measured false alarm probability (e.g. sum of two Gaussian densities or the modified gamma density). This paper presents a first principle derivation of the detector false alarm density function based upon the assumption that the filter output is Gaussian distributed. The resulting false alarm density function is very nearly Gaussian out to about 3.5 standard deviations. Past 3.5 standard deviations the tails of the derived density function are markedly heavier than the corresponding Gaussian tails. The parameters of this new density function are easily estimated from the filter outputs. The analytic results are validated using a Chi-Square goodness-of-fit test and experimental measurements of the false alarm density.

Citation Download Citation

Paul Frank Singer and Doreen M. Sasaki "The heavy-tailed distribution of a common CFAR detector", Proc. SPIE 2561, Signal and Data Processing of Small Targets 1995, (1 September 1995); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.217699

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