Weak Moving Target Detection Based on Short-Time Fourier Transform in Sea Clutter

For narrow-band radars, the linear frequency modulation (LFM) signals are commonly transmitted to acquire the target information. This paper presents a new mono-pulse detection method of detecting the weak moving target in the sea clutter. The de-chirp operation, which is one concept in the wideband radar signal processing and used to reduce the sampling rate, is borrowed to process the noisy echo instead of the traditional matched filter. Then the stretched signal is analyzed by the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) in the time-frequency representation (TFR). Here we introduce the coherent-like integration in the TFR to improve the signal-to-clutter ratios (SCRs). Finally, the Neyman-Pearson criterion is utilized to realize the target detection. Compared with the traditional detectors, the experimental results on the raw data illustrate that our proposed method has a good performance.