Weak Target Detection Within Sea Clutter Based on EMD Fractal Feature

In order to improve the target detection performance within sea clutter under low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR), this paper focuses on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) fractal property of sea clutter and its application on weak target detection. Firstly, the radar signals are reconstructed by EMD algorithm to suppress the impact of noise. Then the autoregressive (AR) spectrum fractal property of the reconstructed signal is analyzed in detail and the EMD-AR Hurst exponent is extracted for target detection. Finally, from analysis of the real radar sea clutter datasets, the results demonstrate that the proposed method increase the target detection probability than the traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) method and the existing fractal-based method under a low SCR condition.