Ship and shipwake enhancement in coastal surveillance radar systems using target back propagation technique

Rotating incoherent radar systems are usually used for coastal surveillance of vessels. Signal to clutter/noise enhancement is obtained by averaging a number of scans. Because the vessels move and thus migrate out of the radar resolution cells, the number of scans that can be averaged is limited by this effect. This paper exploits a target back propagation technique to overcome this problem. Measurements show that a significant enhancement of the ship image quality is achieved using this technique. Also the ship wake is made clearly visible and is subject for further study in the wavenumber domain and Radon transform domain for detection and feature extraction.