10th International Conference on Information SCience, Signal Processing and their Applications (ISSPA 2010)
CFAR Detectors in Presence of Jammer Noise
Amir Zaimbashi, Abass sheikhi
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
Emails: zaimbashi@shirazu.ac.ir.sheikhi@shirazu.ac.ir
Abstract- Cell Averaging C ( A)-CFAR detector is an
optimum detector under the assumption of Rayleigh
distributed homogenous noise background, but in presence of
clipped jamming noise, it does not have the best performance.
In this paper, we compareCA, GO, SO, as, OSGO and ossa
conventional CFAR detectors to obtain superior CFAR
detector in clipped jamming noise. Simulation results show
that the OS-CFAR detector not only provides low loss CFAR
performance in exponential background but also performs
better than that ofCA in clipping jammer noise situations. On
other hand, by using as detector instead of CA detector in
radar, it saddles about 3dB more loss to jammer noise
generator.
Index Terms-ECM, Jammer noise, system noise, CFAR
detector, CFAR loss
I. INTRODUCTION
The objective of electronic countermeasures (ECM)
systems is to reduce the military effectiveness of enemy
equipment involving electromagnetic radiation, such as radar,
communication, guidance, or other radio-wave devices. To
accomplish this objective, both noise jammers and deception
jammers can be used. A noise jamming system is an ECM
device whose objective is to generate a disturbance in the
radar receiver in such a way as to conceal the presence of a
target. For the jamming to be effective, it is necessary to
generate noise that emulates the thermal noise of the radar
receiver as much as possible. In this way, the radar operator
cannot be sure that the radar is being jammed, especially if it
has a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector. One method
of generating a noise of this type is called DIrect Noise
Amplification (DINA) [1]. In this method the noise can be
generated at base band and then heterodyned to RF where it is
power amplified and radiated. Therefore, if it could be
possible to generate a Gaussian noise, the best noise jamming
waveform, it can be statistically impossible to distinguish
between receiver noise generated in victim system and the
externally injected jammer waveform. However, there is a
significant practical problem in generating high-power
Gaussian noise, since most high-power microwave amplifiers
are limited in the peak power they can handle. To preserve the
character of the Gaussian noise waveform, the designer of
978-1-4244-7167-6/101$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
O.4 I-�--�-I-r========::::
- envelope pdf of jammer noise
:;-J
0.35
_. _. - envelope pdf of system noise
0.3
0.25
-.-
10 12 1
4
Fig.l Envelope of theremal system noise and clipping jammer noise
of a radar receiver.
a DINA jammer should use a high power amplifier transmitter
whose compression point is 7dB to 10dB above the root mean
square (rms) value of the noise voltage [2].
In this paper, we consider the practical situation in which
the jammer noise is clipped. On the other hand, the In-phase
(I) and quadrature (Q) components of the jammer noise before
jammer transmitter are assumed independent and identically
distributed (liD) Gaussian random variables with zero mean
and unknown variance 0'2 . But, the envelope amplitude at the
output of the jammer transmitter is clipped in aO' level (See
Fig. I).
Since the clutter or noise power is not known, a fixed
threshold detection scheme cannot be applied to the radar
returns in individual range cells if the false alarm rate is to be
controlled [3]. An attractive class of schemes that can be used
to overcome this problem is the constant false alarm rate
(CFAR) detectors [4, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10]. In this paper, we
evaluate six conventional CFAR detectors, the CA [3], GO
[4], SO [5, 6], OS [7], OSGO and OSSO [8]-CFAR detectors,
to select superior detector in jamming noise in such a way that
it not only provides low loss CFAR performance in
exponential background but also performs robustly in presence
of clipping jammer noise situations.
II. CFAR DETECTORS
A CFAR detector employs an adaptive threshold in order
to remain CFAR irrespective of the interference power. A
block diagram of a CFAR detector is shown in Fig2. The
426

Fig.2 structure of a conventional CFAR detector
range samples are processed through a square law detector and
then are sent serially into a tapped delay line of length N+I.
These N+1 samples include N samples in reference (R)
window (Xi i=l, 2, . . . ,N/2, N/2+1,. . . ,N) surrounding the test
cell Xo and test cell Xo . The samples in the reference window
are independent of each other and of the sample in the test
cell. When a target is present in the test cell, the use of guard
cells(G) between the test cell and the reference window
prevents target energy from corrupting the reference window.
The statistic Z which denotes the estimate of the total noise
power is computed by processing the reference cells
surrounding the test cell. A target is declared to be present if
the cell under test, Xo, exceeds the adaptive threshold pi. The
scaling factor fJ is selected so that the probability of false
alarm does not exeed a predefined limit in homogenous
background. In the following subsections, six conventional
CFAR detectors such as CA, GO, SO, OS, OSGO and OSSO­
CFAR detectors, which are presented in [3-8], are introduced.
A. CA-CFAR Detector
In the CA-CFAR, the statistic i is the sum of N range
cells in the refrence window. This is a complete, sufficient
statistic for the noise power under the assumption of
exponentially distributed homogenous noise background [3].
For this detector, we have
, N
Z = LX, (1)
i=!
Excessive numbers of false alarms in the CA-CFAR at clutter
edges and degradation of detection in multiple target situations
are prime motivation for exploring other CFAR processors to
cure the above problems. Some of these detectors are brought
in the following.
B. GO\SO-CFAR
In the GO (SO)-CFAR detector, the reference samples of
the leading window, X],X2," " XN/2 , and lagging window,
XN/2+],X N2/ +2, , XN, are sumed separately, as
• • •
N/2 tV
U= LX" V= LX, (2)
i=l i=N/2+1
In these detectors, the statIstIc i is selected the larger
(smaller) of two seprate sums U and V. For the GO-CFAR
detector, we have
Z = max(U,v) (3)
and for the SO-CFAR detector, we have
427
i = min(U,V) (4)
C. OS-CFAR Detector
In the OS-CFAR [7] the threshold is obtained from one of
the ordered samples of the reference window. The range
samples are first ordered according to their magnitude, as
x(1) $ ... $ X(kos) $ ... $ X(N)
In this case, the statistic i is taken to be the kth largest
sample X(kos)
,
(5)
D. OSGO\SO- CFAR Detector
In the OSGO (OSSO)-CFAR detector, the reference
samples of the leading (Ie) and lagging (la) windows are
sorted separately, and the mth sorted sample
( xla (m) , Xl, (m) , 0 $ m $ N 12 ) of each window is selected. Then
these samples are compared and the greater (smaller) one is
selected as the estimation of the statistic i. Therefore, for
OSGO detector, we have
i = max(Xla(m),XI'(m)) (6)
and for the OSSO-CFAR detector, we have
i = min(Xla(m), XI'(m)) (7)
III. PERFORMANCE STUDY
In the simulations of this section, as many similar works,
we consider the Rayleigh model for fluctuating targets,
representing Swerling I (SWI) and Swerling II (SWII) (single
pulse assumption) and we examine and compare the
performance of the CA, GO, SO, OS, OSGO and OSSo­
CFAR detectors in presence and absent of jammer noise. We
consider N=24, kos=20 and m=IO [9]. In the presence of
jammer noise, it is assumed that the power of jammer noise is
larger than that of system noise, for range larger than bum
through range, and clipping level varied from 0. 2 to 3,
O.2$a$3. In the simulations of this paper, it is assumed that
the threshold is set based on system noise, unless otherwise
mentioned. Actually, it is assumed that the system donot have
any intelligence about presence of jammer noise.
In the CFAR detectors, it is desired to have PCa less than a
desired value. Therefore, in Fig. 3, the PCa regulation versus
clipping level, a, of the CA and OS detectors is compared
together. It is seen that the PCa of both detectors are less than
design value, Pca=1O·3, and OS detector has lower masking
target effect.
In Fig.4, we present the probability of detection (PD)
against the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for CA, GO, SO, OS,
OSGO and OSSO-CFAR detectors in presence of noise
system only. As it is expected, the CA detector performs better
than the other four detectors. Figs. 5 and 6 present the
performance of the aforementioned detectors in the presence
of noise jamming for various clipping level of jamming
transmitter. From these figures, it can be seen that the
performance of the mentioned CFAR detectors improve as a
increases. Fig. 7 shows that the performance of the mentioned
detectors in jamming noise with clipping level equal to 3 are
the same as that in exponetional clutter or noise only. Fig.8
shows the jammer loss of the CA and OS detectors versus the 0.9
value ofa for Pd=O.9, Pfa=1O·3• The jammer loss is defined by
. SNR(Pja, Pd,a) 0.8

Jammer loss = -----""--''---- (8) "-u

= 00
SNRcA (Pja,P",a ) c·
0.7
0

Where SNRcA is the required signal-to-noise ratio for CA­ UQ) 0.6
;;
0
CFAR detector. As it is observed from Fig.8, the more '0
0.5

clipping of noise at output of jamming transmitter, the more >-

:0 0.4
.,
loss is forced to jammer. For example, if a radar use OS­
e
D --CA
"- 0.3
CFAR detector, and transimitter of jammer clip noise at �GO
- - -so
level 0.5cr, then the jammer loss is approximately equal to - ·- os
0.2

�OSGO
11. 6dB at Po=O.9. This loss is decreased to about 8.85 dB for 0.1
--ossa
the CA-CFAR detector. So, a jammer designer should O ����_L_�_L�_L__'_-L__'_L_��
-5 -2.5 0 2.5 5 7.5 10 12.5 15 17.5 20 22.5 25 27.5 30
consider the above noticeable loss in computing jammer Signal-to- Noise Ratio. SNR(dB)
power and a radar desiner should use the CFAR detector such
as OS to force more loss to jammer. From the Fig. 8, it is Fig.4 Pd comparison of CA, GO, SO, OS, OSGO and OSSO·CFAR in
presence of system noise only.
observed that if there is an intelligent algorithm to detect the
presence of jammer and then set CFAR threshold accordingly,
the above losses can be increased up to 18dB for OS and CA
3
detectors. P
FA
=10- (Threshold Desiged for Exponential Distribution) ,a=0.5

0.9

IV. CONCLUSION 0.8

u
From the results obtained so far, we may make the "- 0.7
C
following general statements about the performance of OS­ .2
13 0.6
CFAR detector relative to CA-CFAR. Though the OS-CFAR *
0
'0
0.5
detector exhibits some loss of detection power in system noise
�
:0 CA
.,
0.4
only compared with the CA-CFAR detector, its performance --

�os
e
D

in non-homogenous and presence of clipped jamming noise is "- 0.3

-- OSSO
clearly superior. On other words, a jammer designer should 0.2
--OSGO
�GO
consider the 2. 75dB more loss in computing jammer power - - -so
0.1
when a radar system use OS-CFAR detector instead of CA­
CFAR detector. This loss also can be increased by using an O ���-�...L-�-'-----'-L--'---'�-'-�-��
-10 -7.5 -5 -2.5 0 2.5 5 7.5 10 12.5 15 17.5 20 22.5 25
Signal-to- Noise Ratio, SNR(dB)
intelegent algorithm to detect presence of jamming noise.
Fig.S Pd comparison of CA, GO, SO, OS, OSGO and OSSO·CFAR in the
presence of noise jamming when clipping level of jamming transmitter is
3 equal to a = 0.5 .
Threshold designed for exponential distribution, P =10·
'a

3
P =10· (Threshold Desiged for Exponential Distribution),a=1
FA

0.9

0.8

"-u
C
0.7
0

UQ) 0.6
;;
0
'0
0.5

�
:0 0.4
.,
e
D --CA
"- 0.3
--GO
10·7 L-_-'-_-'-_----'__.l..-_-'-_-'-_--'__L-_..J - - -so
-as
0.5 1.5 2.5 3 3.5 4.5 0.2
Cliping Level (a) -OSGO
--ossa
0.1

Fig.3 PFA regulation versus clipping level, a , of CA and OS·CFAR in the O��__��...L_�-'-----'_L--'---'�-'-� _��
presence of noise jamming. -10 -7.5 -5 -2.5 0 2.5 5 7.5 10 12.5 15 17.5 20 22.5 25
Signal-to- Noise Ratio, SNR(dB)

Fig.6 Pd comparison of CA, GO, SO, OS, OSGO and OSSO·CFAR in the
presence of noise jamming when clipping level of jamming transmitter is
equal to a = 1 .

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 3
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P =10- (Threshold Desiged for Exponential Distribution) ,0.=3
FA

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a; 262 1 .
E
E 8
.'1

O ������-L��������
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3
a

Fig.8jammer loss of the CA and OS detectors versus a value for Pd=O.9 and
Pfa<IO·3.

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