CONSTANT FALSE ALARM RATE DETECTION OF POINT TARGETS USING DISTRIBUTED SENSORS

The problem of orthogonalization of multiple satellite images, focusin g at the same field of view, is studied in this paper for constant fal se alarm rate (CFAR) point target detection. Information fusion techni ques are incorporated. The Karhunen-Loeve (K-L) orthogonalization meth od offers the best CFAR detection performance. However, it requires ce ntral fusion. It is shown that a version of the Gram-Schmidt (G-S) ort hogonalization method, which preprocesses data in a pipeline form, off ers a comparable CFAR detection to that of the K-L method. Point targe t CFAR detection is carried out by employing various fusion approaches on the orthogonal data. Sensor level fusion with quality information is shown to be preferable when the proposed sequential G-S orthogonali zation is applied. The proposed CFAR approach is applied to dissimilar sensors and avoids overloading the communication channel transmitting only in the case of target detection. Trade-off studies and experimen tal results on real and simulated data are presented. (C) 1998 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.