New detection algorithm of extended targets for radar and electro optical sensors

This paper presents a new technique able to detect extended targets (small ones and big ones) (Ostrovityanov and Basalov, 1985), under very low signal to noise ratios (SNR) and signal to clutter ratios (SCR) with a high probability of detection and a low probability of false alarm. The method is based on the calculation of some modified statistical descriptors (Gonzalez and Woods, 2002), and the peak plots (Rihaczek and Hershkowitz, 2000) from raw sensor image. The peak plots are extracted by means of the shift-and-convolution technique (Perez Martinez et al., 2001). Experimental results are also presented demonstrating the quality of this technique. Experimental results have been obtained with ARIES radar (Perez et al., 2002), a surface marine and coast surveillance LFM-CW high resolution radar (HRR) (Wehner, 1995) developed by INDRA SISTEMAS S.A. in collaboration with the Technical University of Madrid. The Spanish Ministry of Defence has founded this research.