Application of the level crossing rate function to sea clutter

The contribution of this paper is to propose, and compute the level crossing rate (LCR), average calm duration (ACD) and average surge duration (ASD) in the context of radar clutter and false alarm analysis. The derived formulas for the LCR, ACD and ASD are then compared to their measured values calculated from experimental radar sea clutter and are shown to be in good agreement. These quantities are useful for false alarm analysis and synthetic clutter validation. In the clutter region, they provide an estimate of the expected number of spikes per second, the mean spike duration and the mean interval between spikes.