Evaluation Of Airborne Maritime Surveillance Radar Small Target Detection Capability

As we all know,70percent of the global surface is covered by Ocean, it is quite important for one country to safeguard marine right and interests. Maritime patrol aircraft plays a big part in military tasks such as maritime surveillance, reconnaissance, and anti.surface vessel and antisubmarine warfare. The non.military tasks include long.range search and rescue, mostly searching for ships and aircraft in distress. Airborne surveillance radar is among the most important sensors in supporting the aircraft. Though the MPA can carry a series of sensors, such as state.of.the.art IR/EO turret, acoustics, MAD and so on, we have to depend on airborne surveillance radar to detect targets hundred of miles away, in a round.the.clock and all.weather way.Aiming at small target detection problem, the thesis carries out research in clutter characteristics, signal detection theoretics in K.distributed clutter, radar capability evaluation.Through the analysis of clutter reflectivity, amplitude distribution function, temporal correlation coefficient and spatial correlation coefficient, we highlight the fact that high resolution radar clutter is non.stationary, temporal and spatial correlated. Comparing with detection of targets in noise background, It is much more difficult to detect targets in sea clutter.The thesis proposes some points of view on signal detection theories in the aspect of detection threshold, detection probability, signal clutter ratio and CFAR processing. Moreover, The thesis also carries out detection capability analysis in the condition of multi pulses integration, clutter and noise mixing, frequency agility.Base on the quantitative analysis of coupling relationship of range resolution, scan speed and detection capability, the thesis studies detection probability and radar cross.section detection sensitivity as functions of range. We concludes that maritime surveillance radar’s capability envelope is quite different from that of air surveillance radar. Due to the interference from sea clutter, radar’s detection capability at shorter range is not necessarily better than that at longer range.I am sure the study works will have definite reference value for the study of airborne surveillance radar system design.