Nautical radar clutter suppression and small target detection based on image spectrum filtering and Hough transform

• Published in: Journal of engineering (Stevenage, England) Vol. 2019; no. 21; pp. 8098 - 8102
• Main Authors: Bao, Zhonghua, Zhang, Chunlei, Lu, Jianbin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Institution of Engineering and Technology 01.11.2019; Wiley
• Subjects: 2D CFAR detector; 2D filter; distributed SC clutter; false-alarmed detections; Hough transform; Hough transforms; HT technique; IET International Radar Conference (IRC 2018); image filtering; image spectrum filtering; image texture; invert clutter response filter; narrow band feature; nautical radar clutter suppression; object detection; radar clutter; radar detection; radar imaging; raw echo imaging; sea clutter suppression; spiky component; target detection method; target track line extraction; TC clutter; texture component; radar detection; raw echo imaging; false-alarmed detections; image filtering; object detection; TC clutter; nautical radar clutter suppression; Hough transform; texture component; image spectrum filtering; image texture; distributed SC clutter; invert clutter response filter; sea clutter suppression; target detection method; radar clutter; HT technique; Hough transforms; radar imaging; 2D CFAR detector; target track line extraction; spiky component; 2D filter; narrow band feature
• ISSN: 2051-3305; 2051-3305
• DOI: 10.1049/joe.2019.0752

Here, a new clutter suppression and small target detection method was presented for nautical radars based on image spectrum filtering and Hough transform (HT). It is well known that sea clutter can be decomposed into texture component (TC) and spiky component (SC). First, the raw echo image was transferred to spectrum field, taking use of the narrow band feature of TC clutter in the image spectrum field, a 2D filter named as invert clutter response filter was designed to filter the energy of TC clutter in image spectrum field and then recovering the echo image. After that, a 2D CFAR detector was used to get a coarse detection report. Since the influence of the remaining SC clutter, quite a lot of false-alarmed detections may appear for the coarse detections. To solve this problem, the HT technique was proposed to extract real target track lines from many but distributed SC clutter caused false alarms. Measured and simulated results show that the proposed method is quite effective.