Bayesian Detection for Radar Targets in Compound-Gaussian Sea Clutter

Abstract

We consider the detection problem of maritime radar targets in the training-sample-starved and non-Gaussian sea clutter environment. The performance of conventional detectors for radar targets is seriously degraded due to both the starvation of training samples for estimating the clutter covariance matrix and the non-Gaussianity of sea clutter. In this letter, we adopt the inverse Gaussian distribution and the inverse complex Wishart distribution to model the texture and speckle covariance matrix of sea clutter, respectively. Then an adaptive Bayesian detector is developed based on the two-step generalized likelihood ratio test and the maximum posterior estimates of clutter parameters. Finally, the experimental results on simulated and measured data demonstrate the performance superiority of the proposed detector over its competitors, especially when the training samples are starved.