A New Adaptive CA-CFAR based on Local Topology of Sea Clutter for Coherent Detection in High Sea State

Detection in rough sea is a key issue for Doppler maritime radars intended to detect small moving targets. Indeed, heavy sea clutter has very different statistical properties from those of land clutter. A main difference is that sea clutter has an intrinsic large spectral spread. Moreover, this extent is highly inhomogeneous. These properties mean that the CFAR topologies usually used, either in non-Doppler maritime detection or in the detection of ground moving targets are not efficient in the case of coherent maritime detection (high CFAR losses on mobile targets at the border of thermal noise and clutter areas). The proposed CFAR has an adaptive structure that allows it to adapt to the local topology of the noise and sea clutter mixture.