Weighted order statistic and fuzzy rules CFAR detector for Weibull clutter

Order statistic (OS) CFAR processor is a powerful detector, but similar to many other CFAR detectors, suffers from cl utter edge as well as interfering targets. To overcome these problems, two derivations of this detector have been developed. These are order statistic greatest of (OSGO) and order statistic smallest of (OSSO) CFAR processors. The cost, paid for this improvement, is a considerable decrease in detection probability for homogenous Weibull clutter. Furthermore, a substantial performance degradation of OSGO in interfering target (high target masking effect) and an excessive false alarm of OSSO in clutter edge, also, occur. This behavior is a result of non-soft rules used in these two detectors. This paper proposes a weighted order statistic and fuzzy rules-CFAR detector, which employs some soft rules based on fuzzy logic to cure the mentioned problems. Our simulation results demonstrate that considering realistic Weibull clutter, the proposed detector gives better detection probability than that of OSGO and OSSO detectors. Moreover, considering the problems of clutter edge and interfering target, the performance of the method is comparable to the best performance of the OSGO and OSSO detectors in different conditions. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.