Target detection based on correlation and power features in sea clutter

In this paper, an adaptive filter is presented for sea clutter suppression that is based upon the real-time median estimation of the power spectrum of sea clutter from the echoes of the detected cells and adjacent secondary resolution cells. The ACSF can suppress most sea clutter in a received time series while retaining possible echoes from a target with small distortion. Two features relevant to the correlation and average power of the filtered time series are proposed for target detection. With the real sea clutter data and simulated target echoes, the experiment results show that the proposed ACSF is effective, and the detector provides better detection performance than some existing methods do.