Abstract
A conventional target detection technique for FMCW millimeter-wave radar
applies a two-dimensional (2D) cell-averaging constant false alarm rate
(CA-CFAR) detector to all range-Doppler cells in order to suppress noise
and clutter. However, this 2D CA-CFAR method has significant drawbacks,
particularly its high computational cost due to the large number of
additions required, resulting in a time complexity of O(n^{4}). To
decrease the computational complexity while ensuring the detection
accuracy, a novelty CA-CFAR technique based on the prefix sum algorithm
with the complexity O(n^{2}) is proposed in this article.
Simulations prove the feasibility of the proposed method. Compared to
both conventional and state-of-the-art optimized CA-CFAR techniques, the
proposed method reduces the number of addition operations by 95%,
lowers CFAR loss by approximately 0.5 dB, and improves the figure of
merit (FoM) by about 20% at a fixed false alarm rate of 10^{-6}.
This advanced technique offers significant computational efficiency for
radar applications.