Ship Detection Study Using High Frequency Surface Wave Radar

High frequency surface wave radar(HFSWR), providing persistent active surveillence of the sea, is a typical type of the over the horizon radar(OTH). Detection and tracking of ship targets using HFSWR is influenced by the sea clutter. Aiming at ship targets detection and based on the data acquired from the real project, this paper mainly researches on sea clutter suppression, constant false alarm rate(CFAR), track before detect(TBD). The detailed work is organized as followed:After studying the SVD and subspace sea clutter suppression method, a improved subspace sea clutter suppression method based on correlation is proposed. It gives a better suppression result compared to the former algorithm.A CFAR detection process using real data is designed. Considering the feature of the real data and its Weibull distribution, the CFAR detection process is designed as three steps: peak detection using range-doppler-angle data, MLH-CFAR along range dimension, OS-CFAR along doppler dimension.A improved dynamic programming(DP) TBD algorithm is proposed as it concerns not only the K-1 frame but also the K-2 frame during processing.The proposed algorithm solve the problem of missed detection because of RCS changes, CFAR losses and so on. Experiment has been done to prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.Series of signal and data processing have been designed for the real HFSWR system.After completing the pulse compression and digital beamforming algorithm, the sea clutter suppression, coherent integration, CFAR and DP-TBD are proposed as an intgrate ship detection processing scheme. The ship detection result is compared with AIS information given by www.shipxy.com. It shows the efficiency of the proposed scheme which can detect and track the ships in their length of 150 m with maximum detection range of 90 km.