Recent research efforts at Georgia Tech have focused on the development of a multi-resolution ocean clutter model. This research was driven by the need to support both surveillance and search requirements set by several government customers. These requirements indicated a need to support target detection and tracking for both resolved and unresolved scenarios for targets located either above or on an ocean surface. As a result of this changing sensor resolution characteristic for the various acquisition scenarios, a need for accurate ocean surface models at different geometric resolutions arose. Georgia Tech met this need through development of a multi-resolution approach to modeling both the ocean surface and, subsequently, the ocean signature across the optical spectrum. This approach combined empirical overhead data with high resolution ocean surface models to construct a series of varying resolution ocean clutter models. This paper will describe the approach to utilizing and merging the various clutter models as well as the results of using these models in the target detection and tracking analysis. Remaining issues associated with this clutter model development will be identified and potential solutions discussed.
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