An efficient closed form approach to the evaluation of the probability of false alarm of the ML-CFAR detector in a pulse-to-pulse correlated clutter

The problem of adaptive CFAR regulation in a pulse-to-pulse partially Rayleigh correlated clutter is addressed. The clutter is modeled as a first-order Markov Gaussian process and its covariance matrix is assumed to be known. The theorem of residues is used to derive an exact expression for the probability of false alarm P-fa for the mean level (ML) detector. We show that it depends on the degree of pulse-to-pulse correlation of the clutter samples.