Multi-Dimensional Automatic Detection of Scanning Radar Images of Marine Targets Based on Radar PPInet

Traditional radar target detection algorithms are mostly based on statistical theory. They have weak generalization capabilities for complex sea clutter environments and diverse target characteristics, and their detection performance would be significantly reduced. In this paper, the range-azimuth-frame information obtained by scanning radar is converted into plain position indicator (PPI) images, and a novel Radar-PPInet is proposed and used for marine target detection. The model includes CSPDarknet53, SPP, PANet, power non-maximum suppression (P-NMS), and multi-frame fusion section. The prediction frame coordinates, target category, and corresponding confidence are directly given through the feature extraction network. The network structure strengthens the receptive field and attention distribution structure, and further improves the efficiency of network training. P-NMS can effectively improve the problem of missed detection of multi-targets. Moreover, the false alarms caused by strong sea clutter are reduced by the multi-frame fusion, which is also a benefit for weak target detection. The verification using the X-band navigation radar PPI image dataset shows that compared with the traditional cell-average constant false alarm rate detector (CA-CFAR) and the two-stage Faster R-CNN algorithm, the proposed method significantly improved the detection probability by 15% and 10% under certain false alarm probability conditions, which is more suitable for various environment and target characteristics. Moreover, the computational burden is discussed showing that the Radar-PPInet detection model is significantly lower than the Faster R-CNN in terms of parameters and calculations.