RaTDet: A Marine Radar Transformer Network for End-to-End Target Detection

Recent advancements in deep learning have shown considerable potential to enhance radar target detection, particularly in improving detection probability under complex environmental conditions. However, existing deep learning approaches largely operate in the real number domain, neglecting the complex-valued nature of radar data, and often inherit vision-oriented architectures that fail to address radar-specific challenges—such as sparse target echoes, the necessity for phase preservation, and constraints imposed by scanning radar systems. Meanwhile, conventional radar signal processing methods, including CA-CFAR, are limited by their dependence on idealized statistical models and often underperform in dynamic and cluttered electromagnetic environments.To overcome these issues, this paper proposes Radar Transformer for Detection (RaTDet), an end-to-end detection network that integrates complex-valued convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers. RaTDet fully leverages complex-valued data to preserve critical phase and amplitude information, enabling automated feature learning directly from raw radar signals. The model operates effectively with very few pulses, making it suitable for resource-constrained scenarios, and can serve as a pre-trained foundation model for various radar downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that RaTDet achieves excellent detection performance, characterized by high detection probability (Pd) and low false alarm rate (Pfa), outperforming both traditional signal processing and conventional deep learning methods. This work bridges the gap between deep learning and radar signal processing, offering a flexible and powerful network for next-generation radar systems.