A Sea Clutter Suppression Method Based on Machine Learning Approach for Marine Surveillance Radar

Marine surveillance radar is widely used in marine monitoring for its ability of observing sea surface all-time and all-weather. However, the radar target detection performance is seriously affected by the existence of sea clutter. In this article, we propose a new sea clutter suppression method based on machine learning approach. We first employ a cyclic structure network with a pair of generative adversarial networks to sufficiently learn the characteristics of sea clutter, which converts the problem of sea clutter suppression as a transformation from the clutter radar data domain to the clutter-free radar data domain. In addition, we propose a target-consistency loss for the cost function of the network to effectively preserve the target information while suppressing the sea clutter. Therefore, the proposed method can not only effectively remove the sea clutter from the radar data but also protect the target information from being damaged during sea clutter suppression, thereby achieving excellent sea clutter suppression performance. Experimental results have shown the superiorities of the proposed sea clutter suppression method on both simulated and measured marine surveillance radar data.