Radar is an important sensor in electromagnetic spectrum warfare. Its confrontation with naval vessels has become increasingly competitive in recent years. However, current radar anti‐jamming methods are limited to some extent in complex electromagnetic environments, which poses a severe challenge to radar's detection and anti‐jamming capabilities. To improve the anti‐jamming capacity of radar, the authors propose a Stackelberg game‐based optimisation method to enhance the decision‐making of anti‐jamming strategies. First, we analyse the radar's winning conditions by considering the temporal constraints of non‐real‐time radar recognition and preparation actions and construct the radar's actual utility matrix. Second, we construct a Stackelberg game‐based model under the condition of a certain recognition probability, and update the recognition probability and recognition interval during the game. Finally, we discuss the conditions under which the radar can obtain a positive benefit in the game and compare the benefit to the reinforcement learning optimisation method. The simulation experimental results show that the proposed strategy can significantly improve the radar's winning probability in the confrontation.

The confrontation between radar and jammer is increasingly competitive in electromagnetic spectrum warfare. The current radar anti-jamming methods are constrained to some extent in complex electromagnetic environment. To improve the anti-jamming capacity of radar system, a game theory-based optimization method is proposed to enhance the decision-making of anti-jamming strategy in this paper. First, a temporal sequence interaction based dynamic game model between radar and jammer is constructed. Then, Q-learning is performed to optimize the radar anti-jamming strategies. The simulation experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the radar winning probability in the confrontation.

Attacking a naval vessel with multiple missiles is an important way to improve the hit rate of missiles. Missile-borne radars need to complete detection and antijamming tasks to guide missiles, but communication between these radars is often difficult. In this paper, an optimization method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning is proposed for the collaborative detection and antijamming tasks of multiple radars against one naval vessel. We consider the collaborative radars as one player to make their confrontation with the naval vessel a two-person zero-sum game. With temporal constraints of the radar’s and jammer’s recognition and preparation interval, the game focuses on taking a favorable position at the end of the confrontation. It is assumed the total jamming capability of a shipborne jammer is constant and limited, and the shipborne jammer allocates the jamming capability in the radar’s direction according to the radar threat assessment result and its probability of successful detection. The radars work collaboratively through prior centralized training and obtain a good performance by decentralized execution. The proposed method can make radars collaborate to detect the naval vessel, rather than only considering the detection result of each radar itself. Experimental results show that the proposed method in this paper is effective, improving the winning probability to 10% and 25% in the two-radar and four-radar scenarios, respectively.

The echoes collected by wideband radar systems provide abundant information on target scatterers, which is beneficial to target detection, classification, and recognition. However, as the radar range resolution increases, range cell migration (RCM) during the coherent integration (CI) period happens much easier, which may cause a degradation of target detection probability. In addition, due to the target’s orientation and structure relative to the radar, the distribution characteristics of the target scatterers in high-resolution range profiles (HRRPs) and the detection window length may vary from pulse to pulse, which may reduce the performance of traditional energy integration (EI) detectors. To solve those problems, moving range-spread target (RST) detection combining the modified keystone transform (MKT) and improved EI (IEI) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, based on waveform entropy minimization, MKT using hunter–prey optimization (HPO) is introduced to reduce the CI gain loss. The target Doppler ambiguity factor is estimated using such an effective optimization technique. Then, the IEI detector optimized by the adaptive threshold and detection window is utilized to achieve target detection, which minimizes the sensitivity of the traditional EI detector to the detection window length. The proposed method significantly improves the performance of moving RSTs in sea clutter without prior knowledge of the target Doppler ambiguity factor. Experiments are conducted by comparing the proposed method with other competing methods on both simulation data and real sea clutter data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain the CI more efficiently and has a higher detection probability.

Intelligent ship detection based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is vital in maritime situational awareness. Deep learning methods have great advantages in SAR ship detection. However, the methods do not strike a balance between lightweight and accuracy. In this article, we propose an end-to-end lightweight SAR target detection algorithm, multi-level Laplacian pyramid denoising network (LPDNet). Firstly, an intelligent denoising method based on the multi-level Laplacian transform is proposed. Through Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based threshold suppression, the denoising becomes adaptive to every SAR image via back-propagation and makes the denoising processing supervised. Secondly, channel modeling is proposed to combine the spatial domain and frequency domain information. Multi-dimensional information enhances the detection effect. Thirdly, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is introduced into the feature fusion module of the basic framework (Yolox-tiny) so that different weights are given to each pixel of the feature map to highlight the effective features. Experiments on SSDD and AIR SARShip-1.0 demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 97.14% AP with a speed of 24.68FPS and 92.19% AP with a speed of 23.42FPS, respectively, with only 5.1 M parameters, which verifies the accuracy, efficiency, and lightweight of the proposed method.