In this paper, a comprehensive overview of radar detection methods for low-altitude targets in maritime environments is presented, focusing on the challenges posed by sea clutter and multipath scattering. The performance of the radar detection methods under sea clutter, multipath, and combined conditions is categorized and summarized, and future research directions are outlined to enhance radar detection performance for low–altitude targets in maritime environments.
The detection of hypersonic targets usually confronts range migration (RM) issue before coherent integration (CI). The traditional methods aiming at correcting RM to obtain CI mainly considers the narrow-band radar condition. However, with the increasing requirement of far-range detection, the time bandwidth product, which is corresponding to radar’s mean power, should be promoted in actual application. Thus, the echo signal generates the scale effect (SE) at large time bandwidth product situation, influencing the intra and inter pulse integration performance. To eliminate SE and correct RM, this paper proposes an effective algorithm, i.e., scaled location rotation transform (ScLRT). The ScLRT can remove SE to obtain the matching pulse compression (PC) as well as correct RM to complete CI via the location rotation transform, being implemented by seeking the actual rotation angle. Compared to the traditional coherent detection algorithms, ScLRT can address the SE problem to achieve better detection/estimation capabilities. At last, this paper gives several simulations to assess the viability of ScLRT.
In engineering application, there is only one adaptive weights estimated by most of traditional early warning radars for adaptive interference suppression in a pulse reputation interval (PRI). Therefore, if the training samples used to calculate the weight vector does not contain the jamming, then the jamming cannot be removed by adaptive spatial filtering. If the weight vector is constantly updated in the range dimension, the training data may contain target echo signals, resulting in signal cancellation effect. To cope with the situation that the training samples are contaminated by target signal, an iterative training sample selection method based on non-homogeneous detector (NHD) is proposed in this paper for updating the weight vector in entire range dimension. The principle is presented, and the validity is proven by simulation results.
This paper focuses on the adaptive detection of range and Doppler dual-spread targets in non-homogeneous and non-Gaussian sea clutter. The sea clutter from two polarimetric channels is modeled as a compound-Gaussian model with different parameters, and the target is modeled as a subspace range-spread target model. The persymmetric structure is used to model the clutter covariance matrix, in order to reduce the reliance on secondary data of the designed detectors. Three adaptive polarimetric persymmetric detectors are designed based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), Rao test, and Wald test. All the proposed detectors have constant false-alarm rate property with respect to the clutter texture, the speckle covariance matrix. Experimental results on simulated and measured data show that three adaptive detectors outperform the competitors in different clutter environments, and the proposed GLRT detector has the best detection performance under different parameters.
Adaptive detection of range-spread targets is considered in the presence of subspace interference plus Gaussian clutter with unknown covariance matrix. The target signal and interference are supposed to lie in two linearly independent subspaces with deterministic but unknown coordinates. Relying on the two-step criteria, two adaptive detectors based on Gradient tests are proposed, in homogeneous and partially homogeneous clutter plus subspace interference, respectively. Both of the proposed detectors exhibit theoretically constant false alarm rate property against unknown clutter covariance matrix as well as the power level. Numerical results show that, the proposed detectors have better performance than their existing counterparts, especially for mismatches in the signal steering vectors.
In this paper, a detection method combining Cameron decomposition based on polarization scattering characteristics in sea clutter background is proposed. Firstly, the Cameron decomposition is exploited to fuse the radar echoes of full polarization channels at the data level. Due to the artificial material structure on the surface of the target, it can be shown that the non-reciprocity of the target cell is stronger than that of the clutter cell. Then, based on the analysis of the decomposition results, a new feature with scattering geometry characteristics in polarization domain, denoted as Cameron polarization decomposition scattering weight (CPD-SW), is extracted as the test statistic, which can achieve more detailed descriptions of the clutter scattering characteristics utilizing the difference between their scattering types. Finally, the superiority of the proposed CPD-SW detector over traditional detectors in improving detection performance is verified by the IPIX measured dataset, which has strong stability under short-time observation in threshold detection and can also improve the separability of feature space zin anomaly detection.
