Adaptive Clustering‐Based Marine Radar Sea Clutter Normalization

Radar sea clutters are echoes reflected from a patch of ocean surface, which may significantly interfere with the signals from targets, and seriously degrade the performance of marine radar remote sensing. Thus, it is vital to eliminate the effects of sea clutter. In this paper, we aim at normalizing sea clutter to a uniform level. Firstly, a detailed analysis about the characteristics and differences of clutter and targets is presented; then, we present a heuristic processing scheme which works by solving the task of sea clutter normalization as a classification problem followed by energy normalization. Multiscale and speed-up strategies are incorporated into the dynamic clustering algorithm to found a robust real-time normalization method. Finally, extensive experiments show state-of-the-art results on challenging sea clutter echoes, which demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the proposed adaptive clustering normalization method.