Target detection, especially in heterogeneous environments with strong clutter, is a difficult problem in signal processing. The existence of strong clutter in the heterogeneous environment usually causes the estimate of the clutter covariance matrix (CCM) to deviate from the truth, resulting in a degradation in detection performance. To address this problem, a novel CCM estimate method based on heterogeneous clutter clustering is proposed to improve the performance of radar detectors. First, it uses the distribution characteristics of clutter samples on the Hermitian positive-definite (HPD) manifold to segregate the clutter into clusters and select representative samples. Second, based on the cluster centers, a covariance matrix that can enhance the discrimination between the target echo and clutter on the HPD manifold is constructed. The proposed method can effectively enhance the discrimination between target and clutter because the reconstructed covariance matrix can reflect the clutter characteristics better. The advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated by experimental results on both simulated and real data. Compared with the conventional CCM estimation method based on the Log-Euclidean (LE) mean, the proposed method can improve the detection probability by 29%.

This article deals with the problem of detecting maritime targets embedded in nonhomogeneous sea clutter, where the limited number of secondary data is available due to the heterogeneity of sea clutter. A class of linear discriminant analysis (LDA)-based matrix information geometry (MIG) detectors is proposed in the supervised scenario. As customary, Hermitian positive-definite (HPD) matrices are used to model the observational sample data, and the clutter covariance matrix of the received dataset is estimated as the geometric mean of the secondary HPD matrices. Given a set of training HPD matrices with class labels, which are elements of a higher dimensional HPD matrix manifold, the LDA manifold projection learns a mapping from the higher dimensional HPD matrix manifold to a lower dimensional one subject to maximum discrimination. In this study, the LDA manifold projection, with the cost function maximizing between-class distance while minimizing within-class distance, is formulated as an optimization problem in the Stiefel manifold. Four robust LDA-MIG detectors corresponding to different geometric measures are proposed. Numerical results based on both simulated radar clutter with interferences and real IPIX radar data show the advantage of the proposed LDA-MIG detectors against their counterparts without using LDA and the state-of-the-art maritime target detection methods in nonhomogeneous sea clutter.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a commonly used pattern analysis method that maps high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional space maximizing the data variance, that results in the promotion of separability of data. Inspired by the principle of PCA, a novel type of learning discriminative matrix information geometry (MIG) detectors in the unsupervised scenario are developed, and applied to signal detection in nonhomogeneous environments. Hermitian positive-definite (HPD) matrices can be used to model the sample data, while the clutter covariance matrix is estimated by the geometric mean of a set of secondary HPD matrices. We define a projection that maps the HPD matrices in a high-dimensional manifold to a low-dimensional and more discriminative one to increase the degree of separation of HPD matrices by maximizing the data variance. Learning a mapping can be formulated as a two-step mini-max optimization problem in Riemannian manifolds, which can be solved by the Riemannian gradient descent algorithm. Three discriminative MIG detectors are illustrated with respect to different geometric measures, i.e., the Log-Euclidean metric, the Jensen–Bregman LogDet divergence and the symmetrized Kullback–Leibler divergence. Simulation results show that performance improvements of the novel MIG detectors can be achieved compared with the conventional detectors and their state-of-the-art counterparts within nonhomogeneous environments.

This study explores the application of geometric measures‐based means and medians on the Riemannian manifold of Hermitian positive‐definite (HPD) matrix to target detection problems in radar systems. Firstly, the slow‐time dimension of radar received clutter data in each cell is modelled and mapped to HPD matrix space, which can be described as a complex Riemannian manifold. Each point of this manifold is an HPD matrix. Then, several geometric measures are presented for measuring closeness between two HPD matrices. According to these measures, the means and medians of a finite collection of HPD matrices are deduced, and various matrix constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors are designed. The principle of target detection is that if a location has enough dissimilarity from the geometric mean or median estimated by its neighbouring locations, targets are supposed to appear at this location. Moreover, different distance measures adopted in detector can result in different performance of detection. These differences are owing to different measure structure, reflected by the anisotropy of a location on the Riemannian manifold. Numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the relationship between anisotropy of the geometric measures and the detection performance of their corresponding matrix CFAR detectors.