Abstract:This paper studies the multifractal correlation characteristic of sea clutter and its application to the low-observable target detection within sea clutter. Multifractal correlation, which studies the spatial correlation of two points with different singularity intensity, is a generalization of multifractal ‘single point’ statistic. First, the paper introduces the multifractal correlation theory and the computation of the multifractal correlation spectrum. Then the multifractal correlation spectrum is used as a character to analyze the similarity degree to match board. In fact, target detection can be regarded as binary-classification, therefore the SVM (Support Vector Machine) is adopted for target detection. Finally, real sea clutter in different bands, polarizations and resolutions is used to verify the method proposed. The results show that the method has good performance of low-observable target detection.