Small ship detection with high frequency radar using an adaptive ocean clutter pre-whitened subspace method

We propose a novel scheme for using high frequency ocean surveillance radar (HFOSR) to detect slow weak target echoes embedded in temporally correlated sea clutter having a continuous spectrum. General Doppler processing CFAR detection of ships in ocean surveillance radar is usually inhibited by the continuous high order sea clutter. Conventional subspace methods can be utilized to enhance the detection, but they deteriorate dramatically in the presence of correlated sea clutter. In our paper an adaptive sea clutter filtering is introduced which improves the threshold and accuracy of the subspace detection method. Both simulated and real ship targets are used to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.