Automatic CFAR Ship Detection in Single-Channel Range-Compressed Airborne Radar Data

Abstract

The present paper proposes a novel real time oriented ship detection method using single-channel range-compressed airborne radar data. The target detection threshold is computed in range-Doppler domain using constant false alarm rate (CFAR) based sea clutter models. An appropriate training data to compute a bias-free threshold is extracted after performing two major steps. First is the target pre-detection and cancellation in time domain with the proposed pre-detection algorithm. Second is the clutter normalization using the remaining data in Doppler domain. Suitable sea clutter models are then fit to determine the threshold. Real single-channel range-compressed data from DLR’s F-SAR system is used to verify the proposed method.