Abstract:

To address the problem of detecting weak radar targets in the presence of sea clutter, a radar sea surface weak target detection technology based on correlation is proposed. The spatial distribution characteristics of amplitude tails is proposed to estimate the range cell where the target is located, filters out the estimated target range cell data to define the clutter subspace, and then calculates an orthogonal projection matrix based on the de-tailed clutter subspace to achieve clutter suppression. Subsequently, according to the distribution changes of the largest eigenvalue of the covariance matrix in the de-tailed orthogonal projection space, the largest eigenvalue is selected as the test statistic for target detection. The results of real data validation from IPIX (intelligent pixel processing X-band) radar and sea-detecting radar data-sharing program demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms cell averaging constant false alarm rate, de-tailed orthogonal projection, maximum eigenvalue and the combination of orthogonal projection and max eigenvalue detection algorithms. It is proven that the proposed algorithm exhibits good robustness.

Key words: radar target detection, amplitude tailing, orthogonal projection, correlation, maximum eigenvalue