Long-Time Coherent Integration for Marine Targets Based on Segmented Compensation

Long-time coherent integration is an effective method for dim target detection from heavy sea clutter. To detect dim targets, a novel long-time coherent integration method based on segmented compensation is proposed in this paper. The method models the complex motion of a marine target as the combination of multi-stage uniformly accelerated motions. According to the difference of energy distribution in Doppler frequency domain, this method can suppress sea clutter and detect the regions of interest (ROIs). Using time–frequency domain energy analysis, the potential target can be extracted. After estimating the parameters and segmentation, for the potential targets, the phase compensation factor can be used to eliminate the Doppler frequency modulation caused by the complex motion. Finally, for the compensated signal, long-time coherent integration is performed to realize the target detection and discrimination under low signal-to-clutter ratio. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we apply simulation data and measured CSIR data in the experiments. The results show that the proposed method can integrate the energy of target more effectively than MTD and RFrFT, and the novel method has better detection performance for complex moving targets under low signal-to-clutter ratio situation.