Signal processing techniques for maritime surveillance with skywave radar

Detection and tracking of maritime targets using skywave radar is influenced by the propagation medium, interference environment and target scenario. Acquired data display distortion, fading, non-stationarity, and heterogeneity. Brief examples of data are given, then signal processing techniques are developed to provide robust adaptive Doppler processing, rejection of impulsive noise, improved CFAR using the Weibull distribution with robust two-parameter estimation, and a simple track-before-detect scheme for enhancing small SNR target detection performance.