High-Fidelity Clutter Databases for Radar Target Generators

"PRA has already developed a unique high fidelity, physics-based background scene modeling and sensor/scene interaction capability that accurately portray the clutter environment as viewed by radar systems. The focus of our proposal will leverage a highfidelity, open and modular radar simulation framework developed under internal PRA funding and government sponsorship. The simulation framework has been used for evaluation of new radar sensor designs and signal processing concepts, as well as test andevaluation of existing and newly developed radar systems.The objectives of the Phase 1 effort are to 1) prototype a methodology for producing high fidelity, wide area, geo-specific, real-time, digital simulated clutter data for ISTF Radar Target Generators and, 2) provide an integrated architecture design thatsupports the generation and control of radar clutter signal databases. In contrast with the progress in radar technology and computer integration concepts underlying these new systems, the tools for clutter modeling still rely heavily on rule-based, sub-system evaluations, which in many cases lack a proven connection toreal-world demonstrable performance. In many cases these limitations can be traced to self-imposed historical limitations on the allowable complexity of the radar evaluation tools. This proposed technology departs from this norm, bringing years of realworld radar environmental modeling together in a single simulation fr