An Improved CA-CFAR Method for Ship Target Detection in Strong Clutter Using UHF Radar

In this letter, the application of ultra-high frequency (UHF) radar for ship target detection over river is investigated for the first time. Due to the wide beam width of antenna, the ship detection of the UHF radar suffers from the broaden river clutters scattering from water waves. In addition, due to the high resolution, the ship echoes are seriously extended in both range and Doppler dimensions, which is different from the traditional point target signal. Extended target detection in strong river clutter is applied in this letter. Conventional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is limited in this situation, which is applicable to the point target detection in clutter free background. An improved cell-averaging (CA)-CFAR method is proposed based on a joint estimation of threshold in range, Doppler and time serials of range-Doppler (R-D) spectra. Based on the time stationarity of clutter, this three-dimensional (3D) CA-CFAR combines several R-D spectra collected in continuous time to estimate the clutter threshold. The effectiveness of this improved method is validated using both simulated and field data.