Target Detection Through Riemannian Geometric Approach With Application to Drone Detection

Radar detection of small drones in presence of noise and clutter is considered from a differential geometry viewpoint. The drone detection problem is challenging due to low radar cross section (RCS) of drones, especially in cluttered environments and when drones fly low and slow in urban areas. This paper proposes two detection techniques, the Riemannian-Brauer matrix (RBM) and the angle-based hybrid-Brauer (ABHB), to improve the probability of drone detection under small sample size and low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR). These techniques are based on the regularized Burg algorithm (RBA), the Brauer disc (BD) theorem, and the Riemannian mean and distance. Both techniques exploit the RBA to obtain a Toeplitz Hermitian positive definite (THPD) covariance matrix from each snapshot and apply the BD theorem to cluster the clutter-plus-noise THPD covariance matrices. The proposed Riemannian-Brauer matrix technique is based on the Riemannian distance between the Riemannian mean of clutter-plus-noise cluster and potential targets. The proposed angle-based hybrid-Brauer technique uses the Euclidean tangent space and the Riemannian geodesical distances between the Riemannian mean, the Riemannian median and the potential target point. The angle at the potential target on the manifold is computed using the law of cosines on the manifold. The proposed detection techniques show advantage over the fast Fourier transform, the Riemannian distance-based matrix and the Kullback-Leibler (KLB) divergence detectors. The validity of both proposed techniques are demonstrated with real data.