Fractal detector design and application in maritime target detection

The fractal properties of sea clutter are proposed and applied to the maritime target detection. Calculation of the measured data shows that, the Hurst exponent of the sea clutter with targets and the sea clutter without targets are different, which enables us to detect low-observable targets within the sea clutter. This paper explains the reason why the Hurst exponent can distinguish the presence or absence of targets in theory and proposes a fractal detector based on the Hurst exponent. Comparing the fractal detector proposed in this paper to the energy detector by the detection results of 140 frames data of the real sea clutter, it is demonstrated that the fractal detection method has a better detection performance. In order to get systemic conclusions, the new sea clutter data with different signal-to-clutter ratios (SCRs) are constructed in the way that add the sea clutter data with targets to the pure sea clutter data. The results show that the fractal detection method has a better performance than the statistical method on detection of maritime targets, especially maritime weak targets with low SCR.