Sea Clutter Suppression and Target Detection Algorithm of Marine Radar Image Sequence Based on Spatio-Temporal Domain...

Area of Science:

• Marine surveillance and radar signal processing.
• Advanced algorithms for environmental interference mitigation.

Background:

• Sea clutter in marine radar systems leads to significant detection errors, including missed alarms and false alarms.
• Effective suppression of sea clutter is crucial for accurate marine radar target detection.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and validate a novel sea clutter suppression and target detection algorithm for marine radar image sequences.
• To enhance the accuracy and reliability of marine radar target detection by mitigating sea clutter interference.

Main Methods:

• A spatio-temporal domain joint filtering approach is applied to marine radar image sequences.
• The method involves transforming images to the 3D frequency-wavenumber domain using 3D-FFT, modeling sea clutter based on dispersion relations, and filtering the spectrum.
• A 3D-IFFT is used to reconstruct the filtered image sequence for subsequent target detection.

Main Results:

• The proposed algorithm demonstrates significant improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), with an increase of up to 15.3 dB compared to the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method.
• Target detection rates are improved by at least 8% compared to direct detection on original images.
• Validation using real X-band marine radar data confirms the algorithm's effectiveness.

Conclusions:

• The proposed spatio-temporal domain joint filtering algorithm effectively suppresses sea clutter in marine radar images.
• This method enhances target detection performance, offering a substantial improvement in SNR and detection rates.
• The algorithm provides a robust solution for improving the accuracy of marine radar target detection systems.