Radar Detection and Discrimination of Small Maritime Targets at High Altitude and Grazing Angle

The objective of this SBIR is to develop (design, build, and test) and demonstrate real-time high-altitude, high-grazing-angle radar processing software to automatically detect and discriminate signatures associated with small maritime targets. Phase II will result in a near real-time demonstration. Lambda Science’s approach to discriminate small targets from high-altitude sea clutter is to utilize improved multi-scan processing algorithms that incorporate feature-aided multiple hypothesis tracking and real-time clutter modeling. A sophisticated multi-target track picture, using interacting multiple-model filtering, is augmented with extracted target features and sea-clutter predictions. In this way, candidate tracks are discriminated based on consistency with extracted features and predicted clutter in addition to track consistency. Probabilistic data association and/or dynamic programming are used to reduce complexity for near real-time operation. The Tracking and Discrimination processes are conveniently combined by incorporating an appropriate feature related component into the track score to provide a kinematics – based discriminant function for multi-look detection. False alarms and missed detections are reduced by many orders of magnitude with management of beam-shape, revisit, and dwell.