Laser underwater target detection based on Gabor transform

In allusion to characteristics of low SNR target signal and complexity of background in underwater laser signal, a method of detecting underwater laser weak target based on Gabor transform is proposed. Firstly Gabor transform is processed on laser underwater complicated non-stationary signal to turn it to become an approximate stationary signal. Then triple correlation is computed with Gabor transform coefficient and it can eliminate random interference and extrude target signal´s correlation. Since triple correlation peak value of signal with target is far bigger than it of without target and so target can be easily detected. Experiment proves that the proposed method can efficiently detect weak target in low signal-to-noise ratio underwater laser signal with low false alarm rate.