Performance comparison of mean-level CFAR detectors in homogeneous and non-homogeneous Weibull clutter for MIMO radars

In this paper, we analyze and compare the performance of the CA-CFAR, GO-CFAR and the SO-CFAR detectors in homogeneous and non-homogeneous Weibull background with known shape parameter for Multi-Input Multi-Output radars with widely separated antennas. The non-homogeneity is represented by the presence of interfering targets and a clutter edge in the reference window. We derive closed-form expressions of the probability of false alarm of the three detectors in homogeneous environment. Detector performance in non-homogeneous environment is investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The numerical results show that the best performance is obtained by the SO-CFAR in the case of a high number of interferences, whereas the GO-CFAR has the best false-alarm regulation when the number of cells contaminated by clutter exceeds half the number of reference cells.