DFF: Sequential Dual-Branch Feature Fusion for Maritime Radar Object Detection and Tracking via Video Processing

Robust maritime radar object detection and tracking in maritime clutter environments is critical for maritime safety and security. Conventional Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detectors have limited performance in processing complex-valued radar echoes, especially in complex scenarios where phase information is critical and in the real-time processing of successive echo pulses, while existing deep learning methods usually lack native support for complex-valued data and have inherent shortcomings in real-time compared to conventional methods. To overcome these limitations, we propose a dual-branch sequence feature fusion (DFF) detector designed specifically for complex-valued continuous sea-clutter signals, drawing on commonly used methods in video pattern recognition. The DFF employs dual parallel complex-valued U-Net branches to extract multilevel spatiotemporal features from distance profiles and Doppler features from distance–Doppler spectrograms, preserving the critical phase–amplitude relationship. Subsequently, the sequential feature-extraction module (SFEM) captures the temporal dependence in both feature streams. Next, the Adaptive Weight Learning (AWL) module dynamically fuses these multimodal features by learning modality-specific weights. Finally, the detection module generates the object localisation output. Extensive evaluations on the IPIX and SDRDSP datasets show that DFF performs well. On SDRDSP, DFF achieves 98.76% accuracy and 68.75% in F1 score, which significantly outperforms traditional CFAR methods and state-of-the-art deep learning models in terms of detection accuracy and false alarm rate (FAR). These results validate the effectiveness of DFF for reliable maritime object detection in complex clutter environments through multimodal feature fusion and sequence-dependent modelling.