Long-time adaptive coherent detection of small targets in sea clutter by fast inversion algorithm of block tridiagonal speckle covariance matrices.

• The block tridiagonal structure constraint is proposed to model long-time sea clutter sequences. • Fast inversion algorithm of block tridiagonal speckle covariance matrices is given. • Long-time adaptive GLRT-LTD is presented and verified by X-band measured radar data. Low-velocity small target detection in maritime surveillance radars is always a challenging task. Low signal-to-clutter ratio requires long-time coherent integration to obtain enough gain of target returns. However, long-time coherent integration encounters insufficient secondary data due to the spatial inhomogeneity of sea clutter. In this paper, considering the decorrelation time of speckle component of sea clutter short up to a dozen of milliseconds, the spherical invariant random vector (SIRV) model with block tridiagonal speckle covariance matrix and the inverse Gamma distributed texture is proposed to model sea clutter sequences in several tenths of a second. In this model, a long-time adaptive generalized likelihood ratio test with linear threshold detector (GLRT-LTD) is constructed. Owing to the block tridiagonal structure of speckle covariance matrices, the adaptive detection requires much less reference cells for speckle covariance matrix estimation and much lower computational cost for its inversion. The proposed detector is verified by an X-band high-resolution island-based radar data with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as test target. The experimental result shows that it obtains competitive detection performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art detectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]