SAR Target Detection in Complex Scene Based on 2-D Singularity Power Spectrum Analysis

Abstract

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target detection method in the background of a complex scene and extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (EL-SNR) is studied in this paper. With theoretical derivation and analysis, the singularity power spectrum (SPS) is developed into two-dimensional SPS (2D-SPS). Developed from the 2-D Holder exponent and the SPS, the 2D-SPS can be applied for the singularity power analysis of images. Furthermore, a novel SAR target detection method based on 2D-SPS is proposed. The proposed methodology is tested on sea clutters, both with and without SAR ship target, from the OpenSAR data sets. The experimental results indicate that the SAR target detection based on 2D-SPS performs better than conventional multifractal spectrum (MFS) and constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods, and can achieve more than 95% and 98% detection probability, respectively, under EL-SNR with SNR = −30 dB, SNR = −10 dB, and $P_{f} = 10^{-2}$ , and almost 100% detection probability for weak and multiple targets within sea clutters. The proposed method can be applied to target detection under the background of fractal noise and provides a reference for target detection in related fields.