Sea-Surface Small Target Detection Based on Four Features Extracted by FAST Algorithm

On account of current algorithm and parameter design difficulties and low detection accuracy in feature extractions of small target detections in sea clutter environment, this paper proposes a correspondingly improved four feature extraction method by FAST. After the short-time Fourier transform is applied, a time–frequency distribution spectrogram of original data is generated. Candidate feature points (CFP) are first extracted by FAST algorithm, and then a four-feature extraction is implemented with FAST and DBSCAN combined. The feature distinction is enhanced through a feature optimization. Upon the construction of the four-dimensional feature vectors, XGBoost classifier algorithm classifies and detects these feature vectors. The genetic algorithm optimizes the hyperparameters in XGBoost and updates the decision threshold in real time to control the detection method’s false alarm rate. The IPIX dataset is employed for experimental verification. Verification results confirm that this proposed detection method has better performance than several other currently used detection methods. The detection performance is improved by 7% and 13.8% when observation time is set at 0.512 s and 1.024 s, respectively.