Performance assessment of multi-channel radars using simulated sea clutter

Abstract

The generation of synthetic environments, in particular clutter, greatly facilitates the characterization of the performance of radars. This is especially the case for radars operating over maritime areas where the sea clutter is highly dependent on the environmental conditions that cannot be controlled or predicted for assessment of performance in trials. Three levels of complexity of the clutter simulation are considered here, according to the different radar modes to be qualified. The first level relates to non-coherent radars while the other levels aim at stimulating coherent Doppler radars. The last level allows generating coherent signals on multiple channels, for instance to validate complex detection modes such as involving Space-Time dependencies (STAP).

Comparison of bi‐modal coherent sea clutter simulation techniques

“…This includes assessment of the monostatic low grazing angle CSIR dataset [23], the low grazing angle bistatic NetRAD dataset [24], and the medium grazing angle Ingara dataset [4]. This model has been extended for multiple‐phase centres in [25] and for a multiple‐phase centre scanning radar in [26]. A bimodal extension to the model was also presented in [5] and is used for the comparison here.…”

Modeling the Statistics of Microwave Radar Sea Clutter

“…This model has been extended for multiple phase centres in [78] and for a multiple phase centre scanning radar in [79]. It was also observed for the Ingara data that at high values of normalised intensity, the rate of increase of m f (x) with x appeared to reduce when looking up or downwind.…”

Sea Clutter Covariance Matrix Estimation and Its Application to Whitening Filter

“…Before delving into the simulation details, we will briefly describe how the sea clutter returns were simulated. We essentially applied the procedure proposed in [5,18] and simulated two kinds of clutter returns, VV polarized and HH polarized data, for 64 consecutive pulse transmissions. To simulate VV polarized data, the following steps are taken.…”

“…We may easily observe the same results as we did in the VV polarization case. As mentioned earlier, the platform-induced Doppler frequency tends to shift the mean Doppler frequency of the clutter spectrum [18]. To reflect this aspect, we examined the filter outputs, moving around the moving target Doppler frequency while the clutter spectrum remained fixed.…”