High-frequency (HF) surface-wave radar has a wide range of applications in marine monitoring due to its long-distance, wide-area, and all-weather detection ability. However, the accurate detection of HF radar vessels is severely restricted by strong clutter and interference, causing the echo of vessels completely submerged by clutter. As a result, the target cannot be detected and tracked for a period of time under the influence of strong clutter, which causes broken trajectories. To solve this problem, we propose an HF radar-vessel trajectory-prediction method based on a multi-scale convolutional neural network (MSCNN) that combines a gated recurrent unit and attention mechanism (GRU-AM) and a fusion with an autoregressive (AR) model. The vessel’s latitude and longitude information obtained by the HF radar is sent into the convolutional neural network (CNN) with different window lengths in parallel, and feature fusion is performed on the extracted multi-scale features. The deep GRU model is built to learn the time series with the GRU structure to preserve historical information. Different weights are given to the features using the temporal attention mechanism (AM), which helps the network learn the key information. The linear information on latitude and longitude at the current timestep is forecast by combining the AR model with the trajectory output from the AM to achieve a combination of linear and nonlinear prediction models. To make full use of the HF radar tracking information, the broken trajectory prediction is carried out by forward and backward computation using data from before and after the fracture, respectively. Weights are then assigned to the two predicted results by the entropy-value method to obtain the final ship trajectory by weighted summation. Field experiments show that the proposed method can accurately forecast the trajectories of vessels concealed in clutter. In comparison with other mainstream methods, the new method performs better in estimation accuracy for HF radar vessels concealed in clutter.

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can be effectively used to detect ships in the exclusive economic zone. However, the ship signal is concealed and interfered with various clutter and background noise in the Doppler spectrum. In this letter, a range-Doppler (RD) image-based novel ship detection algorithm is proposed by exploiting spatial-frequency information and a unique feature fusion based on the analysis of variance. The algorithm subsumes three successive stages: Stage I—the plausible region of interest is captured, Stage II—the features from different sources are fused into one generalized feature space, and Stage III—an extreme learning machine-based classifier is utilized to localize the ships. Experimental results on challenging HFSWR-RD datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a competitive performance over other ship detection algorithms.

High frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) plays an important role in marine surveillance on account of its ability to provide wide-range early warning detection. However, vessel target track breakages are common in large-scale marine monitoring, which limits the continuous tracking ability of HFSWR. The following are the possible reasons for track fracture: highly maneuverable vessels, dense channels, target occlusion, strong clutter/interference, long sampling intervals, and low detection probabilities. To solve this problem, we propose a long-term continuous tracking method for multiple targets with stereoscopic HFSWR based on an interacting multiple model extended Kalman filter (IMMEKF) combined with an extreme learning machine (ELM). When the trajectory obtained by IMMEKF breaks, a new section of the track will start on the basis of the observation data. For multiple-target tracking, a number of broken tracks can be obtained by IMMEKF tracking. Then the ELM classifies the segments from the same vessel by extracting different features including average velocity, average curvature, ratio of the arc length to the chord length, and wavelet coefficient. Both the simulation and the field experiment results validate the method presented here, showing that this method can achieve long-term continuous tracking for multiple vessels, with an average correct track segment association rate of over 91.2%, which is better than the tracking performance of conventional algorithms, especially when the vessels are in dense channels and strong clutter/interference area.

Aiming at the real-time observation requirements in marine science and ocean engineering, based on underwater acoustic communication and satellite communication technology, a seabed real-time sensing system for in-situ long-term multi-parameter observation applications (SRSS/ILMO) is proposed. It consists of a seabed observation system, a sea surface relay transmission buoy, and a remote monitoring system. The system communication link is implemented by underwater acoustic communication and satellite communication. The seabed observation system adopts the “ARM + FPGA” architecture to meet the low power consumption, scalability, and versatility design requirements. As a long-term unattended system, a two-stage anti-crash mechanism, an automatic system fault isolation design, dual-medium data storage, and improved Modbus protocol are adopted to meet the system reliability requirements. Through the remote monitoring system, users can configure the system working mode, sensor parameters and acquire observation data on demand. The seabed observation system can realize the observation of different fields by carrying different sensors such as those based on marine engineering geology, chemistry, biology, and environment. Carrying resistivity and pore pressure sensors, the SRSS/ILMO powered by seawater batteries was used for a seabed engineering geology observation. The preliminary test results based on harbor environment show the effectiveness of the developed system.

The shipborne high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) platform produces six degrees of freedom (DOF) motion at sea, which affects the performance of radar target detection and remote sensing of ocean surface dynamics parameters. Motion compensation can mitigate the effect of six-DOF motion, but motion parameters (including amplitude and angular frequency) need to be known. Motion parameters obtained by using high precision sensors are affected by the precision error and time delay, thus affecting the effect of motion compensation. To obtain the motion parameters accurately and in real time, a method of identifying the motion parameters by using an artificially transmitted reference radio frequency (RF) signal generated at the shore is proposed. Based on the results of the parameter identification, the reference RF signal and the first-order radar cross-sections (RCSs) modulated by six-DOF motion of the shipborne HFSWR platform can be compensated. The identification of angular frequency is divided into two steps: (1) Preliminary identification results are obtained by using the reference RF signal; (2) the pattern search method is used to further improve the identification accuracy of angular frequency. The amplitude of translation (including surge and sway) can be identified accurately through the reference RF signal. Due to the small amplitude of rotation (including roll, pitch, and yaw), it needs to be identified by the reference RF signal and pattern search method. After identifying the motion parameters, division in the time domain is used for motion compensation. Through the simulation results, both translation and rotation have good motion compensation effects. In addition, the method of using high precision sensors to obtain motion parameters and compensation is compared with the method in this paper, the simulation results of motion compensation show that the latter is better.

The echo of shipborne high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) is modulated by six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) motion, affecting the detection of the target and the remote sensing of ocean surface dynamics parameters. Commonly, motion compensation methods of shipborne HFSWR describe each aspect of the 6-DOF motion as the superposition of sinusoidal motion, which results in the effect of motion compensation affected by the precision of 6-DOF motion parameters. A motion compensation method based on dual reference radio frequency (RF) signals is proposed in this paper, without depending on a sinusoidal motion model to describe the 6-DOF motion. By using the motion compensation parameters, which are relevant to the motion attitude and calculated from the information of dual reference RF signals located onshore, the method realizes the compensation of shipborne HFSWR echo modulated by platform 6-DOF motion. This paper proposes the extraction of reference RF signals from radar echo and analyzes the influence of the location of the reference RF signals’ emission source on the motion compensation method. The result shows that a good motion compensation effect is achieved in eliminating the influence of 6-DOF motion modulation. In addition, a traversal of different reference RF signals’ emission source locations is conducted, and the simulation results show that the method proposed in this paper has universality.