Gross spatial structure of land clutter

The performance of a ground-based surveillance radar system against a particular target depends critically on whether land clutter is important within the region covered, and on the path of the aircraft relative to that clutter. Detailed clutter characteristics can have a much smaller effect on detectability than the gross spatial distribution of the clutter. For any given site, it is possible to produce a binary clutter map and examine several different aircraft paths to find the system performance for that site. However, often the performance for a given class of sites rather than one particular site is required. A more powerful approach is to use a statistical characterisation of the gross structure of clutter visibility (e.g. as a function of terrain type). The paper describes the development of such a statistical representation for use in radar performance modelling, using the theory of binary Markov random fields