Wide-area Surveillance Applicable Core Techniques on Ship Detection and Tracking Based on HF Radar Platform

This paper introduces core techniques on ship detection and tracking based on a compact HF radar platform which is necessary to establish a wide-area surveillance network. Currently, most HF radar sites are primarily optimized for observing sea surface radial velocities and bearings. Therefore, many ship detection systems are vulnerable to error sources such as environmental noise and clutter when they are applied to these practical surface current observation purpose systems. In addition, due to Korea's geographical features, only compact HF radars which generates non-uniform antenna response and has no information on target information are applicable. The ship detection and tracking techniques discussed in this paper considers these practical conditions and were evaluated by real data collected from the Yellow Sea, Korea. The proposed method is composed of two parts. In the first part, ship detection, a constant false alarm rate based detector was applied and was enhanced by a PCA subspace decomposition method which reduces noise. To merge multiple detections originated from a single target due to the Doppler effect during long CPIs, a clustering method was applied. Finally, data association framework eliminates false detections by considering ship maneuvering over time. According to evaluation results, it is claimed that the proposed method produces satisfactory results within certain ranges.