Automated ship detection with image enhancement and feature extraction in FMCW marine radars

Automated ship detection process has been an essential need for modern Radar system to perform automatic target tracking. This automated process is more commonly found in pulse radars with high rate of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), not in Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars with very low rate of SNR. The process of automated ship detection with image enhancement and feature extraction in FMCW radars will be elaborated in this paper. The process of image enhancement is designed to split target from the noise and enhance the image of the target with very low SNR. The output of this process will be classified into several groups by utilizing object geographical, circularity and solidity data. From this process, it clearly shows that with image enhancement, the radar detecting capability in average increases by 390%, 140%, 112% and 62% for radar image within the radii of 2 Nautical Mile (NM), 4 NM, 10 NM and 20 NM. With image classification by geographical data and feature extraction, the ship images will be significantly distinguished from clutter with the accuracy of 90%.