A Real-Time Processing Algorithm for Multi-Plot Marine Targets based on Radar Image Decomposition

This paper investigates a new method for real-time estimating marine target's center of gravity coordinates based on radar image processing to enhance the performance of tracking surface targets without changing the hardware architecture of radar. The proposed method includes two stages: The first is determining an optimal number of layers for radar image decomposition. The second is estimating the target's local maximum regions-plots having the most reflected energies, let us say centroid coordinates, then calculating the target's center of gravity coordinates based on multiple estimated centroids. The method's functionality is verified by analyzing real-time datasets of the marine radar Coast Watcher 100. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method can real-time estimate reliably the target center of gravity coordinates in the marine environment while reducing the processing time significantly compared to the other methods. More importantly, besides the coordinates, the research is also able to roughly estimate other characteristics of marine targets, such as parts of a target that reflect the most energy and their area and the target's direction of movement, which have not been studied in the existing studies and radar. These characteristics provide a solid background for classifying, recognizing neighboring targets, and target tracking problems. © 2023 IEEE.