Small Floating Target Detection Method Based on Chaotic Long Short-Term Memory Network

In order for the detection ability of floating small targets in sea clutter to be improved, on the basis of the complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD) algorithm, the high-frequency parts and low-frequency parts are determined by the energy proportion of the intrinsic mode function (IMF); the high-frequency part is denoised by wavelet packet transform (WPT), whereas the denoised high-frequency IMFs and low-frequency IMFs reconstruct the pure sea clutter signal together. According to the chaotic characteristics of sea clutter, we proposed an adaptive training timesteps strategy. The training timesteps of network were determined by the width of embedded window, and the chaotic long short-term memory network detection was designed. The sea clutter signals after denoising were predicted by chaotic long short-term memory (LSTM) network, and small target signals were detected from the prediction errors. The experimental results showed that the CEEMD-WPT algorithm was consistent with the target distribution characteristics of sea clutter, and the denoising performance was improved by 33.6% on average. The proposed chaotic long- and short-term memory network, which determines the training step length according to the width of embedded window, is a new detection method that can accurately detect small targets submerged in the background of sea clutter.