A Network Model for Detecting Marine Floating Weak Targets Based on Multimodal Data Fusion of Radar Echoes

Due to the interaction between floating weak targets and sea clutter in complex marine environments, it is necessary to distinguish targets and sea clutter from different dimensions by designing universal deep learning models. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the concept of multimodal data fusion from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) to the marine target detection task. Using deep learning methods, a target detection network model based on the multimodal data fusion of radar echoes is proposed. In the paper, according to the characteristics of different modalities data, the temporal LeNet (T-LeNet) network module and time-frequency feature extraction network module are constructed to extract the time domain features, frequency domain features, and time-frequency features from radar sea surface echo signals. To avoid the impact of redundant features between different modalities data on detection performance, a Self-Attention mechanism is introduced to fuse and optimize the features of different dimensions. The experimental results based on the publicly available IPIX radar and CSIR datasets show that the multimodal data fusion of radar echoes can effectively improve the detection performance of marine floating weak targets. The proposed model has a target detection probability of 0.97 when the false alarm probability is [Formula: see text] under the lower signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) sea state. Compared with the feature-based detector and the detection model based on single-modality data, the new model proposed by us has stronger detection performance and universality under various marine detection environments. Moreover, the transfer learning method is used to train the new model in this paper, which effectively reduces the model training time. This provides the possibility of applying deep learning methods to real-time target detection at sea.