{
  "abstract": "Detecting low, slow and small maritime targets remains difficult because sea clutter is non-uniform, non-stationary, non-Gaussian and often observed at extremely low signal-to-clutter ratios. Here we present a switchable Copula-guided Transformer denoising diffusion probabilistic model (SCT-DDPM) for unsupervised radar target detection. The framework replaces the conventional i.i.d. Gaussian forward prior with Copula-structured noise, uses a copula-aware weighted MSE objective to align denoising with the observed dependence structure, and combines diffusion-based anomaly attention with Transformer encoding to score target-like deviations from normal clutter. Across 13 Copula families on the IPIX radar dataset, SCT-DDPM maintained high detection performance. These results show that dependence-aware diffusion priors can improve target-clutter separability and provide a statistically grounded route for configuring diffusion models in complex maritime environments.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Naval University of Engineering",
    "People’s Armed Police Force Engineering University"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 4,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Chao Yu"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Xuanzhu Sheng"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Zhennian Luan"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Shengyong Li"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/8p34503zr7hg0.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.1038/s41598-026-63110-0",
  "fulltext_url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-63110-0",
  "id": "8p34503zr7hg0",
  "issns": [
    "2045-2322"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-63110-0",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "lcc",
      "Q"
    ],
    [
      "lcc",
      "R"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2202|Radar Systems and Signal Processing"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7170168545",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-63110-0_reference.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-07-01",
  "publisher": "Nature Portfolio",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/8p34503zr7hg0.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T13:45:53Z",
      "native_id": "6ebc9d65cdc444e7843e728c851bbc7b",
      "source": "doaj",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-63110-0"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "medicine",
      "origin": "lcc:R",
      "subfield": "general"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Switchable Copula-guided Transformer diffusion model for detecting small sea-surface targets",
  "title_text": "Switchable Copula-guided Transformer diffusion model for detecting small sea-surface targets",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T13:45:53Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/8p34503zr7hg0",
  "venue": "Scientific Reports",
  "versions": []
}