Journal of Xidian University

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Floating small target detection in the sea clutter via block-whitened clutter suppression

LI Dongchen;SHUI Penglang;XU Shuwen   

  1. (National Key Lab. of Radar Signal Processing, Xidian Univ., Xi'an 710071, China)
  • Received:2015-09-22 Online:2016-12-20 Published:2017-01-19

Abstract:

It is always a difficult task for the marine surface surveillance radar to detect the floating small target embedded in the sea clutter. Considering the non-uniform and non-stationary nature of sea clutter, the block-whitening strategy is used to suppress the clutter. By analyzing the differences between the energy distributions of the clutter-only returns and those of the returns with the target in the time-frequency (TF) plane, a TF feature is extracted via the TF-ridge-aided Hough transform. A detector using the TF feature is proposed. Experimental results for the IPIX radar datasets show that the proposed detector attains a better detection performance than the fractal-based detector in a relatively short observation time.

Key words: floating small target, sea clutter, block-whitening, Hough transform, IPIX radar