A fusion method for marine radar images using EM algorithm

Marine radar systems have been equipped by almost sea vehicles. However, radar image quality can be easily deteriorated by signal strength decay with increasing distance, blurring due to side lobes, signals of behind objects and of shaded area. And it is difficult to recover the artifacts. This paper proposes a new approach to improve radar image quality by image fusion. The fusion method generating high quality radar images is based on EM algorithm. Performance was validated using radar images acquired from a single radar system at multiple locations. The experimental results showed that the proposed method constructed high quality radar images, and recovered signal decay and blurring due to side lobes.