CFAR Detection Based on the Nonlocal Low-Rank and Sparsity-Driven Laplacian Regularization for HFSWR

Target detection in high-frequency surface-wave radar (HFSWR) systems is a challenging task due to various sources of interference. In this article, we propose a robust constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector to solve the problem of target detection for the HFSWR by exploiting the prior information on the detection environment. Clutter amplitudes in the HFSWR are commonly assumed to follow the Weibull distribution. Additionally, distribution parameters of the clutter have nonlocal self-similarity, and targets have sparsity as well as a certain geometric structure. We design an objective function based on the Bayesian framework, which consists of a data fidelity term and some regularization terms. Specifically, we use the nonlocal low-rank (NLR) regularization to represent the prior information regarding distribution parameters of clutter, and we adopt the combination of the sparsity and Laplacian regularization to represent the prior information regarding targets. The proposed objective function inherits advantages of the NLR, sparsity, and Laplacian regularization, thereby improving the performance of the proposed detector in the nonhomogeneous clutter. By optimizing the proposed objective function, we obtain estimates of clutter statistics for every cell under test and perform the CFAR detection. Experiments on both simulated data and experimental HFSWR data demonstrate that the proposed detector has a good false alarm regulation property and detection performance in the nonhomogeneous clutter.

Automated summary

A robust CFAR detector is proposed for target detection in HFSWR by utilizing prior information on the detection environment. The objective function designed based on Bayesian framework incorporates NLR, sparsity, and Laplacian regularization to improve detector performance in nonhomogeneous clutter. Experimental results show good false alarm regulation and detection performance of the proposed detector.