Ship Target Length Extraction Algorithm for Airborne Radar High Resolution Range Profile under High Sea Clutter

Due to the difficulty of ship length extraction of airborne radar high range resolution profile (HRRP) under high sea clutter,a ship length extraction algorithm for eliminating the impacts of sea clutter is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the motion features of ship targets are judged by radar track, and the geometric projection between ship movement on the sea surface and HRRP echo acquisition in the slant range plane is estimated. Further, range envelops alignment and azimuth focusing are presented for improving the signal noise rate (SNR) of ship target. Then, in order to separate the edge of target and sea clutter and realize the accurate ship target extraction, a novel idea of graph processing is introduced with mean filtering and adaptive processing. Finally, several series of real data results validate the applicability of the proposed method under high sea clutter, and the results present the average error of ship length extraction is less than 10%. The whole processing results show the proposed algorithm has a robust high measuring accuracy and great engineering application value.