Multispectral maritime background and clutter effects on small surface target detection

This paper concerns multispectral backgrounds and clutter as they hamper the detection process of small surface targets. The variability of target contrast is shown for a number of meteorological conditions in the various spectral bands, for which new types of sensors have become available. It is shown that simultaneous framing with pixel co-location is very essential, which requires automatically the application of staring 2-D arrays. Some additional sensor tricks are introduced such as gated viewing, dynamic range enhancement, and laser 3-D imaging. By proper selection of bands, optimum clutter reduction and detection probability can be achieved for targets such as swimmers, buoys and zodiacs.