Design and evaluation of a sea clutter simulator

This paper outlines the design of a sea clutter simulator based on the K distribution. Sea clutter is the radar backscattered return from the sea surface. Any radar operating in maritime environment must have the ability to compensate for this clutter effect to achieve effective target detection. This is usual done by applying appropriate signal processing techniques. In order to test algorithms, modelling of clutter with appropriate distributions is the preferred technique. In this paper, a method used to generate correlated K distributed clutter as described By Tough and Ward [12] and implemented in software by Glen Davidson [5] have been used to investigate the amplitude characteristics of sea clutter. By using the Kolmogoroff-Smirnoff test, the correlated clutter generated is shown to fit the theoretical K distribution, which is known to model very well the behaviour of sea clutter. This work will be extended to include temporal correlation, and bistatic sea clutter, to be tested against measurement made with the NetRad system described in these proceedings [1].