Correlation feature-based detector for range distributed target in sea clutter

Abstract In this paper, a novel correlation feature-based detector is proposed to deal with the challenging problem of detecting a range-distributed target embedded in nonstationary sea clutter. It is well known that sea clutter consists of a speckle component modulated by texture. The nonstationary property of sea clutter is mainly reflected in texture, but its correlation characteristic is mainly dominated by the speckle. Therefore, this detector using the correlation feature of sea clutter can effectively eliminate the negative effect of the nonstationary property of sea clutter on the detection performance. In addition, in order to get rid of the limitation of the knowledge shortage of target scatterers, the modified entropy method is applied to adaptively estimate the number of target scatterers. The real range distributed target data and high-resolution sea clutter are used to evaluate the detector, and the experimental results show that it attains a better detection performance in comparison with several existing detectors. Comparing with the feature-based detector, the proposed detector can effectively reduce the computational complexity