Improved correlation detector for HF Surface Wave Radar

The challenge in HF Surface Wave Radar (SWR) lies in the detection of a target signal in the background of a strong sea clutter. An improved detector is presented which uses the property that the cut of sea clutter power along the azimuth axis is correlated over neighboring Range Doppler cells. This assumption is proven analytically by using the well established unimodal wave directional spectra. The detector uses one correlation operator and is shown to have a lower bound for a given array and sea state. It allows detection of targets in first and second order sea clutter and can be applied to coastal and mobile systems.