A new CFAR sidelobe canceler algorithm for radar

Signal or target detection is sometimes complicated by the presence of strong interference. When this interference occurs mainly in the sidelobes of the antenna pattern, a solution to this problem is realized through a sidelobe canceler (SLC) implementation. Since the false-alarm probability is a system parameter of special importance in radar, an interference-canceling technique for radar application should maintain the false-alarm probability constant over a wide range of incident interference power. With the requirements of sidelobe interference cancellation and constant false alarm rate (CFAR), a new algorithm for radar detection in the presence of sidelobe interference is developed from the generalized likelihood ratio test of Neyman-Pearson. In this development, the received interference is modeled as a nonstationary but slowly varying Gaussian random process. Cancellation of the sidelobe interference is based upon a `synchronous' estimate of the spatial covariance of the interference for the range gate being tested. This algorithm provides a fixed false-alarm rate and a fixed threshold which depend only upon the parameters of the algorithm