Ship Target Detection in Strong Sea Clutter Background

Ship target detection in strong sea clutter background is generally difficult. This paper firstly discusses the mechanism of sea clutter. Then some useful statistical properties of sea clutter and noise, which are important in optimizing the design of CFAR detectors, are established. Based on the characteristic of the ship target echo forming a single sharp peak in the two-dimension Range-Doppler plane, several familiar 2-D CFAR schemes combined with Peak Detection are presented. The Monte-Carlo simulation indicated that these algorithms has the good capability of adaptive detection when a probability of false alarm of 10~(-4) is given.