HKPM: A Hierarchical Key-Area Perception Model for HFSWR Maritime Surveillance

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) has become the cornerstone of maritime surveillance because of its low-cost maintenance and coverage of wide area. However, when it comes to the extraction of key areas, such as vessel-target detection and vessel-path tracking, the HFSWR signal is strongly interfered by clutters and noise, which makes maritime surveillance a challenging task. This article proposes a hierarchical key-area perception model for maritime surveillance harnessing range-Doppler (RD) image from HFSWR, Laplacian kernel, a linear classifier (LC), and a subnet-based multilayer representation learning framework (SMRLF). First, a weak LC with a Laplacian kernel is utilized to capture the plausible vessel regions (PVRs). Then, a novel SMRLF is proposed to localize the vessel targets from the PVRs. To handle the noise, a maximum correntropy criterion with variable centers (MCC-VC) is incorporated in the subnet-based learning model. A thorough experimental analysis on cross-domain samples from radar dataset to scene classification dataset shows that the proposed HKPM performs competitively. The model shows a superior performance over most of the state-of-the-art vessel-target detection algorithms with a vessel-target detection accuracy of 94%. The extended analysis on image classification problem proves that the proposed model has great adaptivity and scalability.