Implementation of a Modified Faster R-CNN for Target Detection Technology of Coastal Defense Radar

The traditional method of constant false-alarm rate detection is based on the assumption of an echo statistical model. The target recognition accuracy rate and the high false-alarm rate under the background of sea clutter and other interferences are very low. Therefore, computer vision technology is widely discussed to improve the detection performance. However, the majority of studies have focused on the synthetic aperture radar because of its high resolution. For the defense radar, the detection performance is not satisfactory because of its low resolution. To this end, we herein propose a novel target detection method for the coastal defense radar based on faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN). The main processing steps are as follows: (1) the Faster R-CNN is selected as the sea-surface target detector because of its high target detection accuracy; (2) a modified Faster R-CNN based on the characteristics of sparsity and small target size in the data set is employed; and (3) soft non-maximum suppression is exploited to eliminate the possible overlapped detection boxes. Furthermore, detailed comparative experiments based on a real data set of coastal defense radar are performed. The mean average precision of the proposed method is improved by 10.86% compared with that of the original Faster R-CNN.