Excellent performance, real-time and low memory requirement are three vital requirements for target detection in high resolution marine radar system. Unfortunately, many current state-of-the-art methods merely achieve excellent performance when coping with highly complex scenes. In fact, a common problem is that real-time processing, low memory requirement and remarkable detection ability are difficult to coordinate. To address this issue, we propose a novel detection framework which bases its principle on sampling and spatiotemporal detection. The framework consists of two stages, coarse detection and fine detection. Sampling-based coarse detection is designed to guarantee the real-time processing and low memory requirements by locating the area where targets may exist in advance. Different from former detection methods, multi-scan video data are utilized. In the stage of fine detection, the candidate areas are grouped into three categories: single target, dense targets and sea clutter. Different approaches for processing the different categories are implemented to achieve excellent performance. The superiority of the proposed framework beyond state-of-the-art baselines is well substantiated in this work. Low memory requirement of the proposed framework was verified by theoretical analysis. Real-time processing capability was verified by the video data of two real scenarios. Synthetic data were tested to show the improvement in tracking performance by using the proposed detection framework.
Keywords: clutter suppression; extended target; marine radar system; target detection.