Small target detection for solid-state marine radar

Small target detection at sea is an important issue for marine radar. The difficulty derives from the influence of sea clutter and the weak target's echo resulted from its small RCS. In order to solve these two problems, based on solid-state marine radar, the method combining time-frequency decorrelation for clutter and scan-to-scan noncoherent integration for target is proposed. The method firstly makes use of the dispersive character of the slotted waveguide antenna to decrease the correlation between clutter's echoes in different periods, then utilizes the Hough transform to implement the integration aiming at the improvement of Signal to Clutter and Noise Ratio (SCNR). The results of some sea trials demonstrate that the proposed method can decrease the fluctuation of clutter and noise relatively and improve the detection probability.