Abstract:

he ocean clutter is one of the  significant factors that limit the detection performance of the overthehorizon radar (OTHR) system for slowly moving  ship targets. Aimed at the problem that when the Doppler of a target is not significant to allow discrimination in  Doppler, the target peak can be spilt or deviate from the true position, a modified eigenvalue decomposition (MEVD)  approach, which combines the moving target indication (MTI) and an adaptive approach based on eigenvalue decomposition  is adopted. In MEVD approach, the clutter near target is suppressed with MTI and other clutters are suppressed with  adaptive approach. Meanwhile, this approach is able to suppress not only the first order but also high order ocean clutter, so the signal-to-clutter plus noise ratio is increased, which helps to improve detection performance of  OTHR. Theoretical analysis  and the results of simulations and real data processing indicate the effectiveness of MEVD  approach.