Correlation based novel detection scheme for HF Surface Wave Radar

The challenge in HF Surface Wave Radar (SWR) lies in the detection of a target signal in the background of a strong sea clutter. A novel detection scheme is proposed which assumes that for a given Range Doppler (RD) cell in absence of a target, the normalized second order sea clutter power along the azimuth cells will be correlated over neighboring Doppler cells. This assumption is proven analytically by using the well established unimodal wave directional spectra. A target within the second order sea clutter can be detected with the price of higher computation cost.