Radar Clutter Modeling and Analysis
Summary
Radars operating in a maritime environment have a serious limitation
imposed on their performance by unwanted sea echoes. For many years, in
radars with low resolution capabilities, these clutter echoes were considered
as a Gaussian distributed disturbance. In modern radar systems, operating
at low grazing angles and with high resolution capabilities, the statistics
of the sea clutter have been observed to deviate from the normality. The
disturbance is spikier than the Gaussian one and the spikes are processed
by the radar detector as targets, with increasing false alarm rate.
Therefore, a problem of fundamental interest in the radar community
is the modeling of the non-Gaussian clutter to design optimum and sub-optimum
detectors. For the effective application of the theoretical models a detailed
statistical analysis of the live recorded data is necessary to test their
fitting with these models and to highlight the main characteristics and
properties of amplitude, phase and correlation of ground and sea clutter
in different radar parameters and environmental conditions.
Research topics:
Development of non-Gaussian and non-stationary clutter models
Statistical analysis of sea clutter data (moments, histograms, tests
of fit, etc.)
Statistical analysis of ground clutter data (moments, histograms, tests
of fit, etc.)
Guassianity tests based on Higher Order Statistics (HOS)
Publications
- A.Farina, F. Gini, M.V. Greco, L. Verrazzani, "High Resolution
Sea Clutter Data: A Statistical Analysis of Recorded Live Data" IEE
Proceedings Part. F (Radar, Sonar & Navigation), (to appear, 1997).
- B.Billingsley, A.Farina, F.Gini, M.V. Greco, P.Lombardo, "Impact
of experimentally measured Doppler spectrum of ground clutter cancellation
on MTI and STAP", Proceedings of the 1997 International Radar
Conference
, Edinburgh, October 1997.
- A. Farina, F. Gini, M.V. Greco and P. Lee, "Improvement Factor
for Real Sea-Clutter Doppler Frequency Spectra," IEE Proceedings
Part. F (Radar, Sonar & Navigation), vol.143, No 5, pp.341-344,
October 1996.
- A. Farina, F. Gini, M.V. Greco, L. Verrazzani, "Analysis of Sea
Clutter Radar Data," Proceedings of the 1996 CIE International
Conference of Radar, Beijing, China, October 1996.
- A. Farina, F. Gini, M.V. Greco, F. Lombardini, P. Lombardo, K.J. Sangston,
L. Verrazzani, "Radar Detection of Targets: New Theoretical Findings
and Results by Processing Recorded Live Data," (invited paper),
Proceedings
of the 1996 CIE International Conference of Radar, Beijing, China,
October 1996.
- G. Corsini, A. Mossa, L. Verrazzani, "Signal-to-noise ratio and
autocorrelation function of the image intensity in coherent systems:
sub-Rayleigh
and super-Rayleigh conditions", IEEE Trans. on Image Processing,
Vol. 5, n. 1, Jan. 1996.
Contact persons