Sea-surface small target detection using entropy features with dual-domain clutter suppression

In this letter, a new feature-based detector using dispersion relative entropy (FD-DRE) is proposed to detect sea-surface small targets, where clutter suppression is well designed in both Doppler and entropy domains. In Doppler domain, whitened Doppler spectrum is presented to mitigate the main sea clutter region, so as to magnify the geometric difference between sea clutter and returns with target. In entropy domain, dispersion relative entropy (DRE) is developed to condense the difference into single feature for detection, where relative operator can further aggravate the fluctuation of sea clutter. Finally, the experimental results on IPIX database show that FD-DRE detector can significantly improve performance relative to the existing single-feature-based detectors and attain competitive performance as the recent tri-feature-based detector.