Detection of a manoeuvring air target in strong sea clutter via joint time-frequency representation

Two new approaches for detecting a manoeuvring air target in strong sea clutter are proposed. Whereas one is based on the adaptive chirplet decomposition, the other is inspired by spectral subtraction. Unlike the other time-frequency transform-based methods, the approaches presented can both be used to compute a signal´s time waveform with suppressed sea clutter. Experiments with real-world data samples show that both methods can effectively enhance the Doppler radar signals associated with a manoeuvring air target by more than 15-dB.