ZHANG Jun, TIAN Hao, HUANG YingJun. A Novel CFAR Algorithm for Detecting Targets in SAR Images Using Gaussian Mixture Model[J]. Journal of Image and Graphics, 2009, 14(1): 19. DOI: 10.11834/jig.20090104.
A Novel CFAR Algorithm for Detecting Targets in SAR Images Using Gaussian Mixture Model
Clutters in SAR (synthetic aperture radar) image is various and complex. So different kinds of distribution models should be used for CFAR (constant false alarm rate) based target detection of airborne SAR images
which increases the difficulties and complexities of automatic target detection. Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is an extension to Gaussian probability density function. Theoretically
it can approximate any distribution smoothly. In this paper
clutter distributions of SAR image are estimated using the GMM. And a novel CFAR threshold expression was proposed. Describing different clutter distributions with one uniform model
the proposed CFAR detector is more universal since it is less dependent on clutter distributions. The experimental results show that
even though the clutter distributions are unknown
the proposed technique still has a nice performance.