A Ship Discrimination Method Based on High-Frequency Electromagnetic Theory

Ship target detection using radar has important applications in the military and civilian fields. As a decoy, the corner reflector (CR) can successfully deceive a radar by its strong radar cross-section (RCS) to protect a ship. In order to discriminate between a CR and ship, this paper proposes a discrimination method based on three-dimensional characteristics. First, we deduce the basic scattering of CR by the high-frequency electromagnetic theory, and propose a CR decomposition which can solve the problem that the Krogager decomposition has terrible errors in clutter. Then, we introduce the definition of the main scattering polarization and give the multi-dimensional characteristic of CR. Subsequently, we analyze the spatial-time characteristic of radar based on the three-dimensional proportional guidance. With the CR mean square error (MSE), a CR discrimination method is proposed based on the time-spatial-polarization (TSP) joint domains. Finally, the proposed method is analyzed and compared using the fully polarimetric data of Feko software, which can achieve 95% discrimination probability and 4.1% false alarm probability.