Patent ID: 8068385

Claim:
A method for enhancing weak target signals for a sensor array, the method comprising: a) determining the locations of weak candidate target signals using one or more adaptive thresholding processes; b) extracting a wave profile of a center beam signal of a weak candidate target signal and adjacent beam signals of the weak candidate target signal using a local signal profile window; c) determining cross-beam correlations between an extracted wave profile of the center beam signal and extracted wave profiles of the adjacent beam signals and between extracted wave profiles of adjacent beam signal profiles based on the similarity of the wave profiles to determine the occurrence of a weak candidate target signal and compute a set of weighting factors; d) enhancing the center beam signal of the weak candidate target signal based on the said correlations and said set of weighting factors; and e) repeating steps b) through d) for each of the weak candidate target signals to provide enhanced weak candidate target signals, wherein all of the above steps are performed with a pre-processing engine comprising a computer program embodied on a non-transitory computer readable medium.