Detection of HF First-Order Sea Clutter and Its Splitting Peaks with Image Feature: Results in Strong Current Shear Environment

Strong current shear environment always results in the twisty and splitted sea clutter along the range dimension in the range-Doppler spectral map. A sea clutter detection method with image feature is proposed. With 2-D image features in range-Doppler spectrum, the trend of first-order sea echoes is extracted as indicative information by a multi-scale filter. Detection rules for both single and splitting first-order sea echoes are given based on the characteristic knowledge combining the indicative information with the global characteristics such as amplitude, symmetry, continuity, etc. Compared with the classical algorithms, the proposed method can detect and locate the first-order sea echo in the HF band more accurately especially in the environment with targets/clutters smearing. Experiments with real data in strong current shear environment verify the validity of the algorithm.