Improved Clutter Management Techniques for High Resolution Radars

Under Phase I, the team of 3 Phoenix, Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corporation developed and evaluated technology that can provide a substantial performance improvement to the problem of clutter management for radar periscope detection and discrimination applications. The proposed technology includes algorithms and techniques to perform detection of targets in heavy clutter, algorithms for extracting novel physics-based target features, and classifier technology for discriminating sea spikes from periscopes. Preliminary evaluation of these Phase I techniques on synthetic and limited sea data indicates that they have significant promise for improved clutter rejection and target discrimination. In Phase II we will evaluate prototype algorithm implementations using real radar data to demonstrate the extent to which the novel algorithms will add to the overall performance of a periscope detection radar data processor system.