A novel discrimination method of ship and chaff based on sparseness for naval radar

Chaff, a typical passive deceivable interference, is commonly used to cheat radar reconnaissance by producing high fidelity echoes in military counter-mission. It is difficult and challenging to distinguish chaff from ship based on their echoes. Firstly a sparseness characteristic analysis is implemented about ship and chaff return in time-domain and frequency-domain, respectively, which conclude that ship echo is sparse in time-domain, but dense in frequency-domain, inverse so chaff. Secondly the sparseness measurement indexes are defined, with a selection criterion for the optimal binary-coded threshold. Then an algorithm is presented to distinguish ship from chaff based the sparseness measurement indexes . At last a simulation test results verify the correctness and validity of this algorithm.