Efficient compression of radar data

A two-stage technique for compressing radar data is disclosed in which, in the first stage, Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) compression is conducted using a median calculated from at least one dimension of radar data, which is then used to determine filtering threshold values for all dimensions of the radar data. The radar data is then compressed by filtering the radar data based on the filtering threshold values. In the second stage, peak detection is then performed on the compressed data to identify detected objects (targets). These and other embodiments are described herein.