α-MF Detection Based on Spatial Correlation of Sea Clutter

In the high sea state environment, the echo of small and slow ship targets is often submerged by sea clutter, and the conventional adaptive detection often has serious missed detection phenomenon. The adaptive detector is mainly based on the different statistical distribution of the sea clutter texture. However, the spatial correlation of sea clutter has not been attracted enough attention. Considering that the texture components of sea clutter are highly correlated in adjacent range cells, this paper proposes an adaptive detector based on the spatial correlation characteristics of sea clutter. The detector performs joint generalized likelihood ratio detection on the echo vector in the cell under test (CUT) and the echo vectors in the reference cells around the CUT. By adjusting the control parameters a, the detector matches the statistical characteristics of sea clutter amplitude in the CUT. The effectiveness of the proposed detector is verified by using the real sea clutter data. The experiments show that the proposed detector has a significant improvement in detection performance, which compares with the original
$a$
matched filter (a-MF) and matched filter (MF).