SVM-Based Sea-Surface Small Target Detection: A False-Alarm-Rate-Controllable Approach

In this letter, we consider the varying detection environments to address the problem of detecting small targets within sea clutter. We first extract three simple yet practically discriminative features from the returned signals in the time and frequency domains and then fuse them into a 3-D feature space. Based on the constructed space, we then adopt and elegantly modify the support vector machine to design a learning-based detector that enfolds the false alarm rate (FAR). Most importantly, our proposed detector can flexibly control the FAR by simply adjusting two introduced parameters, which facilitates to regulate detector’s sensitivity to the outliers incurred by the sea spikes and to fairly evaluate the performance of different detection algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed detector significantly improves the detection probability over several existing classical detectors in both low signal to clutter ratio (up to 58%) and low FAR (up to 40%) cases.