Detection of Small Floating Targets with Low Cost Radar Systems

Abstract

Improving small target detection in sea clutter is an important step towards making radar a more effective tool for coastal surveillance and infrastructure protection. Terrorist attacks at sea or coming from sea can be expected to be carried out with small boats or jet-ski’s under cover of darkness of under conditions of low visibility. Under these circumstances radar has the potential to become the basic sensor to detect and track these targets over large areas. However ,it is still a challenging problem to detect small targets in the presence of sea clutter (reflections from the sea surface). In this paper whe show that advanced signal processing techniques applied to digitized radar video from a standard navigation radar can greatly improve the detection capabilities of these (low-cost) radars. We discuss the basics of our cluttersuppression algorithm and demonstrate it with results that were obtained with our demonstrator system