A Classification Method for Marine Surface Floating Small Targets and Ship Targets

Feature-based target detection methods are predominantly used to determine the presence or absence of detection targets under sea clutter conditions, but they exhibit a deficiency in making nuanced classification judgments for the different categories of detected targets. Both ship targets and marine surface floating small objects display specific sea clutter characteristics to various degrees. Given the periodic consistency of transient power and the Doppler centroid bandwidth observed in sea clutter, this article examines the manifestation level of this characteristic in both categories of targets, drawing on their respective motion mechanisms. The ability to distinguish between these two categories of targets using this characteristic has been validated through the analysis of empirical data, subsequently leading to the formulation of discriminant statistics that facilitate target classification. The data confirm the effectiveness of this approach, illustrating its robust classification performance.