XPRESS: X-Band Radar Place Recognition via Elliptical Scan Shaping

X-band radar serves as the primary sensor on maritime vessels, however, its application in autonomous navigation has been limited due to low sensor resolution and insufficient information content. To enable X-band radar-only autonomous navigation in maritime environments, this letter proposes a place recognition algorithm specifically tailored for X-band radar, incorporating an object density-based rule for efficient candidate selection and intentional degradation of radar detections to achieve robust retrieval performance. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on both public maritime radar datasets and our own collected dataset, and its performance was compared against state-of-the-art radar place recognition methods. An ablation study was conducted to assess the algorithm’s performance sensitivity with respect to key parameters.