Weak moving target detection based on suprathreshold stochastic resonance in heavy-tailed sea clutter

Detection of weak moving targets with a low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) in heavy-tailed non-Gaussian sea clutter is a challenge problem in radar signal processing. In this study, an easily implementable suboptimum detector in compound-Gaussian (CG) clutter is proposed based on suprathreshold stochastic resonance (SSR). The structure of the locally optimum coherent detector for weak target detection in CG clutter is first analysed and the authors proved that it can be implemented using a pre-processing system followed by the adaptive matched filter (AMF) used in Gaussian backgrounds. A suboptimum pre-processing system is designed using the SSR system consisting of a parallel array of quantisers, which overcomes the high computation cost caused by the calculation of the data-dependent threshold for optimum detectors. Its input-output characteristic can be adjusted by adding different quantiser noise at the input of the system, making it suitable to be used for different distributions of input clutter. The gain of the SSR pre-processing system is introduced and the parameter determination for quantiser noise is analysed. Experiments on both simulated clutter and real sea clutter data in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's database and Intelligent PIXel Grimsby database have shown that the proposed detector based on SSR could achieve robust detection performance and perform better than the existing methods.