Measurement of S band clutter statistics using quasi-deconvolution filter for a phase coded waveform

This paper describes a signal processing technique by which radar clutter data collected with a derivative phase modulated waveform was used to evaluate sea clutter statistical parameters. Two processing options for recovering full bandwidth clutter samples from the radar return signal are matched filter and deconvolution. Both processors may be implemented in the form of a transversal filter (finite impulse response or FIR). The FIR matched filter output contains certain errors, such as filter time sidelobe responses, which are not present at the output of a pure deconvolution process. A transversal filter approximation to deconvolution, quasi-deconvolution, contains similar errors but greatly reduced in magnitude. We have shown that the use of quasi-deconvolution (QD) filters make it possible to accurately estimate two key amplitude distribution statistics for surface clutter: mean and mean/median ration.