Management of interference in Pareto CFAR processes using adaptive test cell analysis

•New switching CFAR developed for Pareto clutter model.•Shown to perform well when CFAR cells subjected to interfering targets.•Manages clutter transitions better than a non-switched detector.•Very good at managing interference during clutter transitions.•Works very well on real data with a synthetic target.

Designing a constant false alarm rate detector to manage successfully interfering targets and clutter transitions has presented researchers with some serious design challenges. One approach has been the application of test cell analysis, using a switching detection mechanism. Such a process has resulted in detector performance improvement in a number of clutter model scenarios. Here a switching based detector is developed for targets embedded within Pareto distributed clutter. It is shown that this new detector can rectify many of the performance issues of detectors introduced recently for target detection in such a clutter environment.