Improving the Performance of the Hough Detector in Search Radars

In this paper, the inherent problem of the Hough transform when applied to search radars is considered. This problem makes the detection probability of a target depend on the length of the target line in the data space in addition to the received SNR from it. It is shown that this problem results in a non-uniform distribution of noise power in the parameter space. In other words, noise power in some regions of the parameter space is greater than in others. Therefore, the detection probability of the targets covered by these regions will decrease. Our solution is to modify the Hough detector to remove the problem. This modification uses non-uniform quantization in the parameter space based on the Maximum Entropy Quantization method. The details of implementing the modified Hough detector in a search radar are presented according to this quantization method. Then, it is shown that by using this method the detection performance of the target will not depend on its length in the data space. The performance of the modified Hough detector is also compared with the standard Hough detector by considering their probability of detection and probability of false alarm. This comparison shows the performance improvement of the modified detector.