Radar Sea Clutter: Modelling and target detection (Radar, Sonar and Navigation)

✍ Scribed by Luke Rosenberg, Simon Watts

• Publisher: Scitech Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 382
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The first maritime surveillance radars in World War II quickly discovered that returns from the sea, soon to be known as sea clutter, were often the limiting factor when attempting to detect small targets while controlling false alarms. This remains true for modern radars, where the detection of small, slow moving targets on a rough sea surface remains one of the main drivers for maritime radar design, particularly in the development of detection processing.

The design, development and testing of radar signal processing for maritime surveillance requires a very detailed understanding of the characteristics of radar sea clutter and of the combined target and clutter returns. This book provides an updated and comprehensive review of the latest research into radar sea clutter and detection methods for targets in sea clutter. The emphasis is on understanding the characteristics of radar sea clutter as observed with different radars, viewing geometries and environmental conditions. This understanding is assisted by the development of mathematical models that are used in the radar design process.

In recent years there has been an increased interest in operating at higher altitudes, resulting in the sea surface being illuminated with larger grazing angles than used in traditional airborne surveillance platforms or ground-based systems. There has also been significant research into bistatic operation, including passive radars using illuminators of opportunity. The use of coherent and multi-aperture systems in maritime radar are also of increasing interest and these new application areas are also covered in this book.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
About the authors
Acknowledgements
List of symbols
List of acronyms
1. Introduction
1.1 Prologue
1.2 Maritime surveillance radars
1.3 The sea surface
1.4 Clutter characteristics
1.5 Sea clutter modelling
1.6 Data sets
1.7 Book outline
References
2. Monostatic sea clutter
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Mean backscatter
2.3 Amplitude distributions
2.4 Sea-spike characteristics
2.5 Doppler characteristics
2.6 Texture correlation
References
3. Bistatic sea clutter
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Bistatic geometry
3.3 Active bistatic radar
3.4 Passive bistatic radar
3.5 Discussion on bistatic sea clutter
References
4. Parametric modelling
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Monostatic mean backscatter
4.3 Bistatic mean reflectivity
4.4 K-Distribution shape
4.5 Doppler spectrum
4.6 Spatial correlation
References
5. Sea clutter simulation
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Uniform Doppler spectrum
5.3 Evolving Doppler spectrum
5.4 Other simulation algorithms
References
6. Performance prediction modelling
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Radar range equation
6.3 Non-coherent processing
6.4 Coherent processing
6.5 Assessing end-to-end radar performance
References
7. Maritime target detection techniques
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Non-coherent detection
7.3 Pareto CFAR detectors
7.4 Coherent detection
7.5 Detection in heterogeneous environments
References
8. New approaches for target detection
8.1 Time/frequency target separation
8.2 Sparse signal separation
8.3 Dictionary learning
8.4 Track before detect
References
Appendix A: Goodness of fit metrics
A.1 Chi-square test
A.2 Kolmogorov–Smirnov test
A.3 Bhattacharyya distance
A.4 Threshold error
References
Appendix B: Bimodal parameters for the evolving Doppler spectrum
References
Appendix C: Atmospheric and precipitation losses
References
Index