Entropy-based detection of manoeuvring range-spread targets in homogeneous weather clutter

Abstract

This paper proposes a waveform-cross-entropy (WCEN)-based detection scheme to detect manoeuvring range-spread targets in homogeneous weather clutter. The input of the detector is composed of complex-valued high resolution range profiles (HRRPs) from a train of coherent pulses in the observation window. The observation window contains a detection window and a reference window, where the received data in reference window is clutter-only secondary data. The detector consists of temporal approximate whitening filtering for clutter suppression followed by the waveform-cross-entropy-based detection. The former is operated on the received vector at each range cell to whiten the clutter and enhance target returns. Then, the WCEN of each pair of filtered power-HRRPs is calculated to capture their sparsity, similarity and energy. The average of the WCENs of all the pairs is utilized as the test statistic to decide whether a target is present or not. Finally, we assess the proposed detector by the raw radar target data collected by high range resolution radar and simulated weather clutter. The experimental results show that the WCEN-based detector outperforms the existing detectors in detection performance for manoeuvring range-spread targets.