Sea Surface Small Target Detection on One-Dimensional Sequential Signal

Abstract

Existing sea surface small target detection methods typically rely on intricate feature extraction techniques on transformed radar returns. However, these approaches suffer from issues of high computational complexity and low real-time performance. Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) can enable direct processing of radar time-series echo data without the need for elaborate feature extraction, thus substantially improving computational efficiency. Building upon this, this paper presents a novel target detection algorithm based on Multi-layer Attention Temporal Convolutional Network (MA-TCN). The proposed algorithm processes the amplitude information in the original echo signals, and comprehensively extracts sequence feature information through the construction of stacked residual modules. Additionally, it integrates multi-layer attention mechanisms to adaptively adjust the output weights of each residual module, thereby further enhancing detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves significant improvements in both detection performance and efficiency compared to existing methods.