Target Detection in Medium Grazing Angle Sea Clutter Using Scan to Scan Processing

Detecting and tracking targets in the maritime domain can be difficult due to the dynamic motion of the sea. Airborne maritime surveillance platforms are also increasingly required to operate at higher altitudes where the on-board radar has to detect and track targets with a weaker signal to interference (clutter plus noise) ratio (SIR). One approach is to use scan-to-scan processing in order to decorrelate the speckle component of the sea-clutter and combat the sea-spikes which last for seconds and can be mistaken for targets. In this paper, we investigate a new scan to scan framework for detecting stationary targets with low SIRs. The performance of this scheme is analysed using a Monte Carlo simulation with simulated medium grazing angle sea clutter.