An overview of marine moving target detection via high-resolution sparse representation

Robust and effective detection of marine moving targets in the sea clutter is one of the fundamental and difficult problems in both military and civil fields. There are both advantages and limitations of classical radar detection methods. Sparsity has been proved as a promising tool to solve inverse problems for a high-resolution solution which mathematically may be nonunique. The main purpose of this paper is to provide ideas for marine moving target detection from the view of sparse representation, which utilizes the merits of compressed sensing (CS). First, a brief introduction of sparse representation is given. Then the research status of sparse representation for marine moving target detection is described, the morphological component analysis (MCA) based detection method is introduced, and the feasibility of sparse time-frequency representation used for radar target detection is analyzed. Moreover, we give an example of sparse representation-based marine target detection using real data, which indicates the effectiveness of the detection method. Finally, the future research direction of the detection method is presented.