Automated Peak Detection in Doppler Spectra of HF Surface Wave Radar

High-frequency surface wave radar is suitable for large-area detection of vessels. This study develops an automated identification procedure to improve an artificial technique for finding the local peak in Doppler spectra. For obtaining vessel information, an image processing method, namely the watershed segmentation, is integrated into the adaptive signal identification (ASI) algorithm, which has been developed by our research group, for rapid division of several local regions of spectra to extract ship returns. A comparison with automatic identification system (AIS) data proves the feasibility of the proposed method for automatically detecting vessel echoes.