Detection of Aircraft Embedded in Ground Clutter by Means of Non-Doppler Radar

Abstract

The Moving Target Indicator (MTI) is usually utilized in order to detect the moving targets embedded in ground clutter. Coherent Doppler radar is used for the typical MTI. As an alternative, we investigate an area MTI using a non-Doppler radar. The area MTI is defined as scan-to-scan cancellation, that is, the observed area is subtracted from scan to scan. This time, we observed an aircraft embedded in ground clutter at Niigata airport by using an X-band non-Doppler radar. It is shown that the amplitude statistics after scan-to-scan cancellation obey a Weibull distribution. To suppress such ground clutter, we apply a noble Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) method. An improvement value of target-to-clutter ratio 18.95dB was obtained.