Multifractal Correlation Analysis of Autoregressive Spectrum-Based Feature Learning for Target Detection Within Sea Clutter

Fractal theory has improved the target detection performance under sea clutter background. However, the traditional fractal methods in time domain or Fourier domain cannot accurately characterize the complex sea clutter properties, which leads to the degradation of the target detection performance under low signal-clutter-ratio (SCR) conditions. This article investigates the multifractal correlation property of sea clutter in the autoregressive (AR) spectrum domain for detection performance improvement. In this work, the traditional target detection problem is converted to a binary classification problem of sea clutter and targets. The refined fractal characteristics in various singularity scale interval and range bins are analyzed, and the AR singularity intensity correlation function width together with the accumulation area of AR multifractal correlation spectrum is extracted as intrinsic features. Then, a simple and efficient fully connected network is developed to realize the classification. Experimental results on real measured marine radar datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can increase the detection probability by about 15% than the state-of-art fractal-based methods under a low SCR condition.