A Novel Multi-Scan Joint Method for Slow-Moving Target Detection in the Strong Clutter via RPCA

Slow-moving target detection in strong clutter background is a critical issue for the ground-based radar system. To detect the slow-moving target effectively, a novel multi-scan joint target detection method via principal component analysis (RPCA) is proposed. For radar echoes, there are two useful properties: 1) Stationary ground clutters have low-rank property, since the clutters in adjacent scan intervals are almost similar; 2) Moving targets have the sparse characteristic, due to their variation of position and sparsely distributed. Thanks to these two properties, moving targets can be separated from the stationary clutters via RPCA. Compared with the moving target indicator (MTI) method, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only can suppress clutters effectively, but also preserve the moving target as much as possible.