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

Lambda Science's approach to radar detection and discrimination of small targets in 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 (MTT) 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. We call it "MTT&D instead of detect". Probabilistic data association is used to reduce complexity for near real-time operation.