Efficient TR‐TBD algorithm for slow‐moving weak multi‐targets in heavy clutter environment

In this study, the authors present an efficient time‐dimension‐reduced track‐before‐detect (TR‐TBD) processor for slow‐moving weak multi‐targets detection in strong clutter environment. In their proposed framework, they elaborate observations from multiple frames (or scans) and resample them in time direction, then distinguish the slow‐moving targets from the clutter in the radon parameter domain by exploiting the fact that different velocities of targets have different skewing angles corresponding to their tracks in the range–time (range–pulse) plane. To further enlarge the skewing angles differences between the slow‐moving targets and the clutter, TR‐TBD is proposed by incorporating the time‐dimension reduction operator. This is very helpful to amplify the skewing angle of slow‐moving targets, while the improvement is very small for the clutter. Therefore, it is much convenient to figure out the slow‐moving weak targets from heavy clutter environment based on their amplified skewing angle differences by setting proper threshold. After detecting the targets, CLEAN‐based track recovery method is proposed to eliminate the false tracks and recover the true tracks. Experimental results on real‐data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can detect the closely spaced targets and eliminate the false tracks under low signal‐to‐noise ratio and signal‐to‐clutter ratio.