Target Detection in Sea Clutter with Application to Spaceborne SAR Imaging

In this paper, the challenging task of target detection in sea clutter is addressed. We analyze the statistical properties of the signals received from the scene and based on that, we model the amplitude of the signals reflected from the sea clutter according to the Weibull distribution. Subsequently, we utilize the aforementioned information to design an adaptive threshold based on the Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm to detect the energy of the targets which have been buried in the sea clutter. Thorough analysis of the experimental data gathered from the Canadian RADARSAT-1 satellite demonstrates the overall effectiveness of the proposed method.