A New Maritime Moving Target Detection and Tracking Method for Airborne Forward-looking Scanning Radar.

Weibo Huo,Jifang Pei,Yulin Huang,Jianyu Yang,Qian Zhang

doi:10.3390/s19071586

Abstract

Maritime moving target detection and tracking through particle filter based track-before-detect (PF-TBD) has significant practical value for airborne forward-looking scanning radar. However, villainous weather and surging of ocean waves make it extremely difficult to accurately obtain a statistical model for sea clutter. As the likelihood ratio calculation in PF-TBD is dependent on the distribution of the clutter, the performance of traditional distribution-based PF-TBD seriously declines. To resolve these difficulties, this paper proposes a new target detection and tracking method, named spectral-residual-binary-entropy-based PF-TBD (SRBE-PF-TBD), which is independent from the prior knowledge of sea clutter. In the proposed method, the likelihood ratio calculation is implemented by first extracting the spectral residual of the input image to obtain the saliency map, and then constructing likelihood ratio through a binarization processing and information entropy calculation. Simulation results show that the proposed method had superior performance of maritime moving target detection and tracking.

Highlights

The rapid development of global trade has greatly promoted the demand for marine transport and tourism, which increases marine accidents [1,2,3]
The target can be effectively detected by traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) technologies [10,11,12], and the trajectory can be estimated through the tracking filter [13,14]
Inspired by the saliency detection approach, this paper proposes a new target detection and tracking method, named spectral-residual-binary-entropy-based particle filter based track-before-detect (PF-TBD) (SRBE-particle filter (PF)-TBD), which is used to detect and track maritime moving target for airborne forward-looking scanning radar

Summary

Introduction

The rapid development of global trade has greatly promoted the demand for marine transport and tourism, which increases marine accidents [1,2,3]. Fine weather condition and calm sea surface benefit target detection and tracking because of the high signal clutter ratio (SCR) of the radar echo. In this situation, the target can be effectively detected by traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) technologies [10,11,12], and the trajectory can be estimated through the tracking filter [13,14]. In addition to the weak scattering of the target, the SCR will become quite low In this case, traditional detection and tracking method will generate massive false alarms, making it hard to detect the true target [15]

Methods

Results

Conclusion