Synthetic Radar-Signal Environment: Computer Generation of Signal, Noise, and Clutter

Computer simulations are widely used in multi-sensor system tests. Algorithms for detection, tracking, classification, identification, intent/threat evaluation, etc., are tested either by using measured real data, or with synthetically generated computer data. Real data is expensive to record and can only be available for simple, sample scenarios. Therefore, a synthetic representation of the radar signal environment is essential. How realistic the synthetic data is depends on the physical and statistical understanding of the radar signal environment, and its stochastic modeling based on random-number generation. This tutorial briefly reviews the generation of a synthetic radar-signal environment.