A Novel Radar TBD Detection Approach for Weak Marine Targets in Dense Clutter Based on Modified Hough Transform

Focusing on radar dim targets detection in dense clutter environment, we propose a novel track-before-detect(TBD) method based on modified Hough transform. On the basis of traditional two-stage TBD detector framework, an additional plot censoring stage was designed and a single frame observation based modified Hough transform(MSHT) was presented. By inspecting the SMHT results over several consecutive scans with the constrains of multi-scan collinear and maximum expected velocity, most of the clutter-derived plots were effectively eliminated. To detect multi targets simultaneously, the traditional block-based Hough transform was improved to be a form named as data-matched Hough transform (DMHT), which automatically adapts the original of the observation space according to the censored plots, and can significantly prompt the resolution and detection ability of multi targets in the parametric space. The analytic expression of the new detector's detection performance was given based on the random run distribution theory. Tests on both the simulated and measured data sets show the effectiveness and good detection performance of the proposed method, especially in dense clutter environments. © 2022 Chinese Institute of Electronics. All rights reserved.