UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models

We address the problem of detection of targets obscured by a forest canopy using an ultrawideband (UWB) radar. The forest clutter observed in the radar imagery is a highly impulsive random process that is more accurately modeled with the recently proposed class of alpha-stable processes as compared with Gaussian, Weibull, and K-distribution models. With this more accurate model, segmentation is performed on the imagery into forest and clear regions. Further, a region-adaptive symmetric alpha stable (S/spl alpha/S) constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) detector is introduced and its performance is compared with the Weibull and Gaussian CFAR detectors. The results on real data show that the S/spl alpha/S CFAR performs better than the Weibull and Gaussian CFAR detectors in detecting obscured targets.