A new approach for sea target detection in satellite based passive radar

This paper discusses the problem of sea target detection in satellite based passive radars. This problem is the consequent of two main factors. The first factor, which is common in all passive radars, is that the transmitter is not under the control of radar designer and its ambiguity function is usually undesirable for radar use, therefore the target is masked by the leakage of reference signal, clutter, and stronger targets. The second and more important problem in sea target detection is that the sea targets cannot be extracted from clutter in Doppler domain due to their close velocity. To overcome these problems, an LS based algorithm is proposed in this paper. In the proposed algorithm the reference signal leakage is attenuated by ECA algorithm, then using a least squares algorithm and a two dimensional cell averaging CFAR, the targets are extracted. Simulation results show that the approach is more effective in compared with the ambiguity function based algorithms in terms of accuracy and resolution.