New implementation of the Billingsley clutter model for GMTI data cube generation

Abstract

Internal clutter motion (ICM) places significant limits on the effectiveness of STAP clutter suppression techniques, for example in achieving the smallest minimum detectable velocity in GMTI radar surveillance applications. To simulate this effect with maximum fidelity, the required correlation must be impressed on the returns from individual scatterers during the construction of the data cube. Doing so can represent a substantial computational burden on the simulation process when a clutter scene is characterized by many millions of individual pixels. Such numbers are typical when using high fidelity SAR maps as the basis of the clutter model. The paper reports on a fast computational technique for wind-blown clutter simulation that works within a flexible data-generation system employing real high-fidelity IFSAR maps with co-registered elevation data as ground truth.