Low Observable Radar Target Detection Method within Sea Clutter Based on Correlation Estimation

Abstract

The long-time coherent integration can effectively improve the detection ability of radar targets. However, this strategy usually shows poor effect in resisting the sea clutter, which produces difficulties for accurate estimation of sea clutter characteristics and results in the inability to differentiate between the target and sea clutter. To solve this problem, a two-stage method is proposed, which consists of the sea clutter suppression stage and target decision stage. In the sea clutter suppression stage, the correlation time differences in the time and the space domains are adopted to estimate the correlation of sea clutter. Then, a selective whitening filter is proposed, which is performed more adaptively according to the estimation results. In the decision stage, the peak average ratio in the fractional Fourier domain (FRFT-PAR) is presented, which can make better use of the energy accumulation characteristics and further suppress the interference of sea clutter. Experiments on the IPIX datasets with various observation times and polarization modes are included. The results indicate that the proposed method could not only effectively suppress sea clutter but also achieve better target detection performance than baseline algorithms.