The potential of 2D wavelet transforms for target detection in sea-clutter

Small target detection in sea clutter remains a challenging problem for radar operators. This paper investigates the potential of using a stationary wavelet transform (SWT) to improve target detection in medium grazing angle X-band sea-clutter. One level of the 2D SWT produces four sub-bands which highlight or suppress different features of the non-stationary sea-clutter. Once they have been individually reconstructed back to the original domain, both the amplitude statistics of the sub-bands and their relative detection performance are investigated. This analysis demonstrates a significant improvement when using a cell-averaging constant false alarm rate detection scheme in the time domain with targets that lie on or outside the endo-clutter region.