Subband adaptive coherent detection of weak moving targets in K-distributed sea clutter

In this paper, the subband detection scheme and «-adaptive matched filter (a-AMF) are combined to detect the weak moving targets in high-resolution sea clutter. First, subband deposition, essentially a frequency division scheme, alleviates the contradiction of the limited homogeneous range cells for reference and the large number of integrated pulses. Next, the amplitude of sea clutter at individual subbands is modeled by K distribution. Then, the different characteristics of subband clutters are exploited into the α-AMF detector at each subband which depends on the shape parameter of K distribution and can be implemented easily in real radar system. Finally, experimental results using real sea clutter data indicate that the subband α-AMF detector attains better performance compared with subband ANMF detector owing to the use of characteristics of sea clutter and the good performance of α-AMF.