Low-Velocity Small Target Detection With Doppler-Guided Retrospective Filter in High-Resolution Radar at Fast Scan Mode

Abstract

It is a difficult task for high-resolution maritime radars operating at a fast scan mode to find sea-surface floating and low-velocity small targets due to ubiquitous sea clutter, sporadic sea spikes like target returns, and shortage of shared database. In this paper, a simulation method is presented to generate high-resolution radar returns of a local sea surface with a structural trend in texture and sea spikes by integrating the existing results on large-scale sea surface generation, sea surface reflectivity, Doppler characteristics of sea clutter, and properties of sea spikes. Generally, sea-surface small target detection at a fast scan mode is composed of intrascan integration to suppress sea clutter and interscan integration to exclude false alarms and sea spikes. Based on the Doppler difference between targets and sea clutter at the two time scales of a coherent processing interval (CPI) of tens of milliseconds and a scan period of several seconds, a Doppler-guided retrospective filter (DGRF) detector is proposed, which uses the optimum coherent detection in intrascan integration and a DGRF in interscan binary and test statistic integrations. The two integrations and Doppler consistency of integrated plots are fused for the final decision. Owing to the Doppler guidance, the proposed detector effectively impedes the integration of false alarms of the intrascan processing and provides significant detection performance improvement, which is verified by the simulated data and real radar data with test small targets.