The double threshold detecting strategy is widely used for spatially distributed target detection in practical systems. However, the detector is limited in terms of robustness and effectiveness. In this paper, an improved double threshold detector is proposed that avoids these shortcomings. In the proposed detector, the energy in range cells that exceed the first threshold is accumulated and then the output of the accumulator is compared with the second threshold for detection. The threshold selection strategy is derived to guarantee the constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) property. A simulation shows that the proposed detector is superior to the conventional approach in terms of both robustness and effectiveness.

In this letter, a method for the construction of polar codes based on the mutual information approximation (MIA) is proposed for the 4Tb/in2 two-dimensional inter-symbol interference (2D-ISI) channels, such as the bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR) and two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR). The basic idea is to exploit the MIA between the input and output of a 2D detector to establish a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) distribution model based on the MIA results, which compensates the gap caused by the 2D ISI channel. Consequently, the polar codes obtained by the optimization techniques previously developed for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels can also have satisfactory performances over 2D-ISI channels. Simulated results show that the proposed polar codes can outperform the polar codes constructed by the traditional methods over 4Tb/in2 2D-ISI channels.