Target detection algorithm for Airborne Radar based on Map Information

Due to the strong ground clutter, there will be much land false alarms for airborne radar when detecting the sea target on the sea-land boundary, which will severely degrade the radar's detection performance. In this paper, a new target detection algorithm for airborne radar based on map information is proposed. In the proposed framework, the longitude and latitude information of the radar detection area was calculated first, using the carrier aircraft attitude data provided by inertial navigation system. Then the sea-land information based on the longitude and latitude was searched on the map data, aiming to realize the sea-land segmentation and get the sea-land. The target detection process was implemented based on the sea-land contour map. The proposed algorithm is experimentally validated using the real echo data, indicating that the proposed framework can recognize the target's sea-land position exactly and help selecting or eliminating targets as demanded, which can significantly reduce the false alarm rate and improve the radar's detection performance.