In marine radar target detection, sea clutter will cause a large number of missed alarms and false alarms, which will affect the accuracy of target detection. In order to suppress sea clutter effectively, a sea clutter suppression and target detection algorithm of marine radar image sequence based on spatio-temporal domain joint filtering is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is to add a sea clutter suppression link before detecting the target. Firstly, the marine radar image sequence is transformed into three-dimensional frequency wavenumber domain by three-dimensional fast Fourier transform (3D-FFT), and then the three-dimensional image spectrum is obtained. According to the fact that the sea clutter spectrum obtained from the image spectrum satisfies the dispersion relation of linear wave theory in the three-dimensional frequency wavenumber domain, a sea clutter model is established. Then, through the established sea clutter model, a spatio-temporal domain joint sea clutter suppressor is designed to filter the image spectrum. After that, the filtered image spectrum is transformed by three-dimensional inverse fast Fourier transform (3D-IFFT) to obtain the image sequence in which sea clutter is suppressed. Finally, target detection is carried out for sea clutter suppressed image sequence. The method is validated by using the real data of X-band marine radar. Compared with the classical Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method, the improvement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is more obvious, and SNR can be increased by 15.3 db at most. In addition, compared with target detection on original images directly, the proposed method has excellent detection rate and can increase detection rates by at least 8%.

In this paper, the retrieving significant wave height from X-band marine radar images based on shadow statistics is investigated, since the retrieving accuracy can not be seriously affected by environmental factors and the method has the advantage of without any external reference to calibrate. However, the accuracy of the significant wave height estimated from the radar image acquired at the near-shore area is not ideal. To solve this problem, the effect of water depth is considered in the theoretical derivation of estimated wave height based on the sea surface slope. And then, an improved retrieving algorithm which is suitable for both in deep water area and shallow water area is developed. In addition, the radar data are sparsely processed in advance in order to achieve high quality edge image for the requirement of shadow statistic algorithm, since the high resolution radar images will lead to angle-blurred for the image edge detection and time-consuming in the estimation of sea surface slope. The data acquired from Pingtan Test Base in Fujian Province were used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved method which takes into account the water depth is more efficient and effective and has better performance for retrieving significant wave height in the shallow water area, compared to the in situ buoy data as the ground truth and that of the existing shadow statistic method.

In this paper, the application of the emerging compressed sensing (CS) theory and the geometric characteristics of the targets in radar images are investigated. Currently, the signal detection algorithms based on the CS theory require knowing the prior knowledge of the sparsity of target signals. However, in practice, it is often impossible to know the sparsity in advance. To solve this problem, a novel sparsity adaptive matching pursuit (SAMP) detection algorithm is proposed. This algorithm executes the detection task by updating the support set and gradually increasing the sparsity to approximate the original signal. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the data collected in 2010 at Pingtan, which located on the coast of the East China Sea, were applied. Experiment results illustrate that the proposed method adaptively completes the detection task without knowing the signal sparsity, and the similar detection performance is close to the matching pursuit (MP) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) detection algorithms.

Currently, it is a hot research topic to retrieve the wave parameters by using X-band marine radar. However, the rainfall noise usually exists in the collected marine radar images, which seriously interferes with the extraction of the wave parameters. To reduce the influence of rainfall noise, the zero-pixel percentage (ZPP) method is widely used to detect rainfall in radar images, but the detection accuracy is limited, and the selection of the threshold needs to be further studied. Based on the ZPP method, the ratio of zero intensity to echo (RZE) method for rainfall detection is proposed in this paper. The detection threshold is determined by statistical analysis of a large amount of radar data. Additionally, it is proposed for the first time to retrieve the rainfall intensity level from X-band marine radar images. In addition, the concept of the occlusion area is proposed. The proposed area and the wave area are used as the rainfall detection area of the radar image, respectively, for experimental research. The data obtained from the Pingtan experimental base in Fujian Province are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed method is 11.7% higher than that of the ZPP method, and the accuracy of rainfall intensity level retrieval is 84%.

The research on retrieving wave parameters from X-band marine radar images based on the spectral analysis method is investigated in this paper. Since the sea wave field is not always homogeneous and stationary in the spatial and temporal domain, especially in the coastal shallow water area, the two-dimensional continuous wavelet transform (2D CWT) is currently utilized to retrieve wave spectrum and wave parameters for improving the inversion accuracy. Although the wavelet is concentrated around the given wavenumber, the CWT of the original image is spread out over a region. By deeply investigating the CWT and its application on radar image, a novel method based on the synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SWT) is proposed to effectively extract wave parameters from the radar images. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified based on the simulated radar image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SWT method has better performance than the traditional three-dimensional fast Fourier transform (3D FFT) method and the wavelet-based method for retrieving wave height. The performance of retrieving wave direction and wave period is close to that of both the 3D FFT-based method and the CWT-based method.

In this paper, we consider retrieving individual wave components in a multi-directional sea wave model. To solve this problem, a currently and commonly used method is three-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (3D DFT) on the radar image sequence. However, the uniform frequency and the uniform wavenumber in a wavenumber frequency domain can not always strictly satisfy the dispersion relation, and the spectral leakage in both temporal and spatial domains exists due to the limited analysis area selected from an image sequence. As a result, the DFT method incurs undesirable error performance in retrieving directional wave components. By deeply investigating the data structure of the multi-directional sea wave model, we obtain a new and decomposable matrix representation for processing the wave components. Then, a novel successive cancellation method is proposed to efficiently and effectively extract individual wave components, whose frequency and wavenumber rigorously satisfy the liner dispersion relation. Thus, it avoids spectral leakage in the spatial domain. The algorithm is evaluated by using linear synthetic wave image sequences. The validity of the proposed novel algorithm is verified by comparing the retrieved parameters of amplitude, phase, and direction of the individual wave components with the simulated parameters as well as those obtained by using the 3D DFT method. In addition, the reconstructed sea field using the retrieved wave components is also compared with the simulated remote sensing images as well as those attained using the inverse 3D DFT method. All the simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is more effective and has better performance for retrieving individual wave components from the spatio-temporal remote sensing image sequences than the 3D DFT method.