– Incoherent primary radar is an applicable means for security surveillance of low-altitude airspace. An experimental airspace surveillance radar system has been developed for such applications. Target detector based on radar images is a powerful technique for the system. The main difficulty in designing such a detector is the rejection of heavy edge clutter for the plane position indicator (PPI) radar images after background subtraction.
– The paper proposes an edge clutter rejection (ECR) detector with spatial characteristics to detect target instead of sheer threshold segmentation.
– The paper chooses the optimal parameter values for the ECR detector and compares it with the existing techniques. Detection results show that the proposed detector achieves higher probability of detection with low false alarm rate, outperforming the fixed-threshold detector and the popular constant false alarm rate detectors. The ECR detector also presents limited computational cost due to its concentration on the pixels detected by the fixed-threshold algorithm with low threshold.
– The aviation security of low-altitude airspace can be greatly increased by designing affordable airspace surveillance radar system.
– The paper presents critical techniques for clutter rejection with PPI images, which is a significant part of the surveillance system.
