Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 2721: Study on Sea Clutter Suppression Methods based on a Realistic Radar Dataset (Remote Sensing)

To improve the ability of radar to detect targets such as ships with a background of strong sea clutter, different sea-clutter suppression algorithms are developed based on the realistic Intelligent PIxel processing X-band (IPIX) radar datasets, and quantitative research is carried out. Four algorithms, namely root cycle cancellation, singular-value decomposition (SVD) suppression, wavelet weighted reconstruction, and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) weighted reconstruction and their corresponding suppression methods are introduced. Then, the differences between the four algorithms before and after sea-clutter suppression are compared and analyzed. The average clutter-suppression and target-suppression amplitudes are selected as measures to verify the suppression effect. Sea-clutter data collected in the high-sea state, low-sea state, near-sea area, and far-sea area are selected for statistical analysis after suppression. All four methods have certain suppression effects, among which EMD reconstruction is best, reaching an average clutter-suppression range of 15.507 dB and a signal-suppression range of about 1 dB, which can improve the ability of radar to detect targets such as ships with a background of strong sea clutter.