Physics-Guided Physical-Coordinate Center Detection for Measured Radar Point Targets Under Ground Clutter

Measured radar point-target detection under ground clutter is difficult because weak target echoes often compete with clutter peaks, and image-space detections do not directly represent physical range-Doppler coordinates. This paper proposes a waveform- and physics-guided center detector (WPG-Center) for measured radar maps. The method reformulates detection as continuous physical-coordinate center localization, constructs a four-channel clutter-aware range-Doppler (RD) representation, uses an anisotropic backbone with range-clutter response modulation, and supervises the center heatmap with waveform-resolution-aware Gaussian targets. Conditional physical-prior decoding is used as a targeted candidate reranking step for low-bandwidth, near-zero-Doppler cases. Experiments are conducted on the measured LSS-Ku-1.0 dataset using a strict blocked 5-fold linear frequency-modulated (LFM) protocol with physical localization tolerances and decoded-center detection metrics. WPG-Center achieves a probability of detection (Pd) of 0.850±0.101 and a range root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 18.16±12.19 m, giving the best average decoded-center detection probability and range accuracy among the compared learned and constant false-alarm rate (CFAR)-style baselines, including an independent radar feature pyramid network (Radar-FPN) heatmap detector. The fixed-sigma ablation is substantially weaker, supporting the need for resolution-aware supervision. Fold-wise, qualitative, and stepped-frequency waveform (SFW) analyses are reported as auxiliary evidence to define the scope of the measured LFM conclusion.