CA-CFAR Performance in K-Distributed Sea Clutter With Fully Correlated Texture

Sea clutter has been a long-standing issue in old and modern radars. Under this context, the K-distribution has emerged as a promising clutter model to accurately mimic sea signal variations in a large variety of radar systems. To guarantee an adequate radar performance in the presence of sea clutter, the family of constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) detectors has been commonly used. In particular, due to its adequate balance between performance and implementation, the cell-averaging CFAR (CA-CFAR) detector has been considered an attractive detection mechanism to enhance radar performance over various clutter environments. In this work, we assess radar performance considering a CA-CFAR detector operating over K-distributed sea clutter with fully correlated texture. More precisely, we derive novel closed-form expressions for the probability of detection ( <tex-math notation="LaTeX">PD </tex-math> ) and the probability of false alarm ( <tex-math notation="LaTeX">PFA </tex-math> ) that can be readily evaluated using any mathematical software. Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations corroborate our analytical findings.