Multi-scale Modeling Approach for Detecting Low Observable Targets within Sea Clutter

Sea clutter refers to the radar backscatter from the ocean surface. Accurate modeling of sea clutter and rough sea surface is an important problem in radar signal processing and applications, as it facilitates robust detection of low observable targets within sea clutter, which has significant importance to coastal security, navigation safety and environmental monitoring. Great efforts have been made to model sea clutter. However, the nature of sea clutter is poorly understood and the important problem of target detection within sea clutter remains a tremendous challenge. We propose a systematic, multi-scale approach to model sea clutter. By extensively utilizing available real data, we (1) develop methods to better fit non-stationary and non-Gaussian sea clutter, (2) characterize correlation structure of sea clutter on multiple time scales, and (3) develop accurate and readily implementable methods to detect low observable targets within sea clutter.