Estimation of the circular error probability for a Doppler-Beam-Sharpening-Radar-Mode

A Maximum-Likelihood-Estimation for the positioning accuracy of a Doppler Beam Sharpening-Mode on an X-Band-Radar will be described in the following, in order to verify the positioning errors in the generated radar images. The positioning accuracy is quantified by the so-called circular error probability(CEP), which is the radius around the true target position containing the measured target position by a probability of 50% or 95%. A CEP model is presented along with a maximum-likelihood-test in order to compare the measured errors with the expected ones by the CEP model for true flight test data. The maximum-likelihood-test allows to take into account the correlation of the error sources and to derive standard deviations for the estimated parameters.