Marine radar system of systems for radar image quality improvement using EM algorithm

It is important to improve the quality of marine radar images because marine radar systems play a principle role of sea surveillance. However, it is difficult to recover signal strength decay with increasing distance, signals of behind objects and of shaded area. This paper proposes a new approach to improve radar image quality with system of systems (SoS) technology. The SoS is based on a ship-to-ship communication in which ships send and receive radar images, and the SoS constructs the high quality radar images using EM algorithm. Performance was validated using a computer simulation and using radar images acquired from a single radar system at multiple locations. The experimental results showed that the proposed method constructed high quality radar images, and recovered signal decay and signals of behind objects and of shaded area.