Improving Detection in Sea Clutter using Waveform Scheduling

In this paper, we propose a method to exploit waveform agility in modern radars to improve performance in the challenging task of detecting small targets on the ocean surface in heavy clutter. The approach exploits the compound-Gaussian model for sea clutter returns to achieve clutter suppression by forming an orthogonal projection of the received signal into the clutter subspace. Waveform scheduling is then performed by incorporating the information about the clutter into the design of the next transmitted waveform. A simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.