Sea-surface Small Target Detection Based on K-NN with Controlled False Alarm Rate in Sea Clutter

Owing to the complicated characteristics of high-resolution sea clutter and the diversity of sea-surface small targets, there is no precise parameter model to describe sea clutter and returns with targets. As a result, target detection faces many obstacles. To distinguish sea clutter and target returns, it is effective to extract their features to transform the detection problem into a classification problem in feature space. Feature-based detection is a binary hypothesis test in the feature space that encounters two intrinsic difficulties: one difficulty is insufficient target returns versus sufficient sea clutter; the other difficulty is an uncontrolled false alarm rate in detection. To solve the first difficulty, a generator of typical targets returns that can generate sufficient simulated targets returns is used to balance the number of samples between two classes and assist to design the detector. K Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) is the type of classification method that is simple and effective; however, it cannot be used to detect small targets directly because of the uncontrolled false alarm rate. This paper proposes a modified K-NN method with a controlled false alarm rate for detecting small targets. Experimental results on the IPIX radar database indicate that the proposed detector attains 85.1% and 89.2% rates of target detection for the observation time of 0.512 s and 1.024 s, respectively, compared with other existing feature-based detectors, the proposed detector exhibits 7% and 5% improvement, respectively. Thus, the proposed detector exhibits more stable and effective detection performance than other existing feature-based detectors.