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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS

The Fractal Properties of Sea Clutter and Their

Applications in Maritime Target Detection
Feng Luo, Danting Zhang, and Bo Zhang

AbstractThis letter studies the fractal properties of sea clutter,

mainly including the box-counting dimensions and multifractal
spectra. Those properties of sea clutter with targets and sea clutter
without targets are compared and found different, which enables
us to develop methods to detect low-observable targets within sea
clutter. An integral test is utilized to compare the multifractal
spectra of sea clutter under different conditions. In practice,
researchers can hardly get enough real data of variable signalto-clutter ratio (SCR) to get systemic conclusions. Therefore, we
construct new sea clutter series from real data with variable SCR.
The results show that the detecting methods based on fractal
analysis have strong performance of maritime target detection at
very low SCR.
Index TermsBox-counting dimension, fractal, integral test,
multifractal, sea clutter.

I. I NTRODUCTION

Fig. 1. Rangetimeintensity image (in decibels) of radar echoes.

EA clutter refers to the backscattered returns from a patch

of the sea surface illuminated by a radar pulse. Accurate
understanding, characterizing, and modeling of sea clutter are
crucial in remote sensing and target detection within sea clutter. The analysis of clutter is traditionally performed from a
statistical point of view, and typical models are Rayleigh, lognormal, Weibull, and compound-K distributions, etc. [1]. However, in modern radar systems operating at low grazing angles
with high-resolution capabilities, sea clutter is often observed
to be highly non-Gaussian, nonlinear, and nonstationary [2]
[4] and, hence, the limitation of detection performance. The
introduction of fractal geometry provides a new method to
describe natural rough structures [5]. Since the attempt in [6],
great efforts have been made to analyze radar signals from sea
surface by fractal methods, and a variety of concepts, such as
fractal surface model [7][9], fractal dimension [10], multifractal analysis [11], [12], high-order fractal feature [13], and
joint statisticalfractal approaches [14], have been introduced.
Although fractal method cannot replace statistical analysis at
present, various fractal statistics have been found very sensitive
to the presence of targets within sea clutter. Therefore, the fractal method provides an effective way to detect low-observable
targets.
This letter is an extension of [15], where the fractal features
of sea clutter were analyzed and an integral test, which was

Manuscript received May 29, 2012; revised October 19, 2012 and July 19,
2012; accepted November 7, 2012.
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology
on Radar Signal Processing, Xidian University, Xian 710071, China (email:
luofeng@xidian.edu.cn; danting0118@163.com; startpc_zb@163.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2013.2237750

based on the difference between multifractal spectra of sea

clutter with and without targets, was proposed to detect targets
within sea clutter. We go considerably beyond [15] in that we
carry out a more detailed study of the fractal properties of sea
clutter, including the fractal differences between targets and
clutter, the relationship between the box-counting dimension
and the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR), the relationship between
the integral test and the SCR, and the change of fractal features
with the length of utilized series. The sea clutter data utilized in
this work are more typical for that we choose two targets and
a strong sea clutter outside the targets. Moreover, we construct
new sea clutter series with variable SCR from real data, which
reduces the loss of credibility compared with methods like
Monte Carlo simulation. The verification shows that the method
has a stronger performance of target detection than traditional
moving target detection. It should be pointed out that the
conclusions in this letter are staged results of our work and need
further research.
II. S EA C LUTTER DATA AND F RACTAL A NALYSIS
A. Introduction of Real Sea Clutter Data
The sea clutter data utilized in this work were acquired by
a linear frequency modulation (LFM) pulse compression radar
that was located on a mountaintop facing the Pacific Ocean,
at a height of 500 m above the sea level and a grazing angle
of approximately 1 . The bandwidth of the LFM signal is
5 MHz, the pulsewidth is 46 s, and the pulse repetition interval
is 3787 s. The rangetimeintensity image (in decibels) of
radar echoes in range bins 22002550 is shown in Fig. 1, in
which we pick two primary targets and a strong sea clutter.

1545-598X/$31.00 2013 IEEE

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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS

TABLE I
VARIANCE OF THE B OX -C OUNTING D IMENSION S ERIES

Fig. 2. Box-counting dimensions of sea clutter.

B. Simple Fractal Analysis

A fractal has been defined as a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at
least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole [5],
a property called self-similarity. There are diverse fractal features for studying a fractal set, among which the fractal dimension is the most popular fractal feature that measures how rough
or irregular a set is. There are a number of definitions of fractal
dimension, among which the box-counting or box dimension is
the best practical one and can be easily evaluated. Let F be any
nonempty bounded subset of Rn , and let N (F ) be the smallest
number of sets of diameter at most which can cover F . The
box-counting dimension dimB F is defined for a fractal set F
as follows [16]:
dimB F = lim

log N (F )
.
log

(1)

Here, we assume that 0 < < 1 to ensure that log is

strictly positive. For a time series F R2 , the box-counting
dimension can be estimated simply by following the procedure
shown in [6], where it is further shown that the dimension
estimates converge to a fixed value as the number of sample
points increases, and when the number of sample points reaches
2000, the estimate becomes stable.
In our calculations, a long sea clutter series is divided into
several overlapped short series of uniform length such as 2000
or 3000, the adjacent two short series having respective overlaps
of 1000 or 2000, and then, the fractal features can be obtained
from each series. Fig. 2, in which the lengths of utilized series in
each calculation are 2000, 3000, 4000, and 5000, respectively,
shows the box-counting dimensions of sea clutter with targets
and without targets. The box-counting dimensions of sea clutter
with targets are greater than those without targets, for the presence of a target changes the state of the sea surface. Moreover,
the box-counting dimension fluctuation of pure sea clutter is
greater than that of clutter with targets. This can be measured
by the variances listed in Table I, from which we can also find
that the variances are basically stable.
However, a single fractal dimension cannot adequately characterize the structure and property of a fractal object. For example, when the sea is sufficiently rough, the dimensional variance
between clutter and targets becomes imperceptible [17]. One

thus resorts to multifractal, which compensates the limitation

of single fractal dimension. Multifractal method employs a
continuous spectrum of exponents (i.e., the singularity spectrum) to characterize fractal systems. This spectrum describes
the growth features of a fractal object in different levels and
researches the systems whole character from its local.
In [15], our sea clutter data were already verified to be nonGaussian, long-time correlated, and scale invariant in large
scales, which ensures further multifractal analysis. The process
of calculating the multifractal features of sea clutter is as
follows.
Let X = {Xk , k = 1, 2, 22 , . . . , N } denote a sea clutter time
series, where N = 2n is the intercepted length of a signal.
We first normalize the time series into unit. Denote the new
time series as x = {xk , k = 1, 2, 22 , . . . , N }, where xk = Xk /
N
j=1 Xj . Then, we form the partial summation of x to construct a partition function S(q) = {Si (q), i = 1, 2, . . . , n}
N

Si (q) =

m


q
(
xm
k )

(2)

k=1

m
m
where m = 2i , x
k =
l=1 xm(k1)+l , and q ( < q <
+) is a real value which determines the weight of probability
measure x
m
k to Si (q). A positive q emphasizes large weight,
while a negative q emphasizes small weight. One then examines
whether the following scaling law holds [i.e., for a given q,
log(Si (q)) is a linear function of log(m)] and ascertains the
q range in which the following holds:
Si (q) m (q)

(3)

where (q) is the scaling exponent function of real value q. To

calculate (q) with a given q, one can use the least squares (LS)
estimate given in
log2 (Si (q)) (q) log2 (m) + const.

(4)

When the scaling law described by (3) holds, the process

under investigation is said to be a fractal process. Furthermore,
if (q) is not a linear function of q, the process is a multifractal;
otherwise, it is a monofractal [18].
Here, a sea clutter series with an intercepted length of 2048 is
used to test (2)(4). The log2 (m)log2 (Si (q)) plots are shown
in Fig. 3, where the circles represent the result of real data
and the solid lines represent the corresponding ordinary LS
regressions. A general measure of linearity is the correlation
coefficient. The correlation coefficient X,Y between two random variables X and Y is given by
cov(X, Y )

X,Y =
var X var Y

(5)

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LUO et al.: FRACTAL PROPERTIES OF SEA CLUTTER AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN TARGET DETECTION

Fig. 5. Multifractal spectra of sea clutter.

Fig. 3. log2 (m)log2 (Si (q)) curves.
TABLE II
C ORRELATION C OEFFICIENT B ETWEEN log2 (m) AND log2 (Si (q))

Fig. 4. q (q) curve.

Fig. 6. ()s of sea clutter.

where cov means covariance, var means variance, and

|X,Y |  1. Moreover, X,Y close to 1 or 1 suggests that
there is a positive or negative linear relationship, respectively,
between the data columns; X,Y close to or equal to zero
suggests that there is no linear relationship between the data
columns.
The result listed in Table II shows that the linear relationship
between log2 (m) and log2 (Si (q)) is fairly strong in a large
range of q = 30 to q = 30, which means that the scaling law
holds well, so sea clutter is a fractal process.
Fig. 4 shows the q (q) curve, where an obvious inflection
point appears near q = 0. This means that (q) is not a linear
function of q, so sea clutter is multifractal.
The multifractal spectrum can be obtained by applying
the Legendre transformation to the scaling exponent function
q (q)
(q) = q(q) f ((q))
d (q)
= (q)
dq

(6)
(7)

where (q) is the singularity intensity and f ((q)) is the

multifractal spectrum function.
III. D ISCUSSION
Fig. 5 shows the multifractal spectra of sea clutter with
target 1 and sea clutter without targets at different moments. It
indicates that the presence of a target changes the multifractal
spectrum. This suggests a new method to detect low-observable
targets in sea clutter. To obtain a measurable value, we merely
form an integral test as

() = f ()d.
(8)
0

Figs. 6 and 7 show the ()s of sea clutter with targets

and without targets. The lengths of utilized series in each
calculation are 1024, 2048, and 4096, respectively, since the
intercepted length of sea clutter is 2n . From Fig. 6, we can see
that the ()s of pure sea clutter are greater than those of sea

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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS

Fig. 8.

Fig. 7. ()s of sea clutter.

TABLE III
VARIANCE OF THE I NTEGRAL T EST S ERIES

clutter with targets. From Fig. 7, we can see that, the longer the
series that we use in calculating, the smoother the results that
we get. Moreover, the varying trend of sea clutter with targets
is greater than that of pure sea clutter. This can be measured
by the variances of the integral test series, which are listed in
Table III. Furthermore, Fig. 7 shows that () changes a little
with the lengths of utilized series in each calculation while it
changes relatively more with the series number. This means that
the multifractal spectra hold for a short time.
Equation (4) shows that (q) is calculated by the LS estimate,
and the sample size in each LS estimate, for example, is 12
if 2048 N < 4096 and is 13 if 4096 N < 8192, since
the intercepted length of sea clutter is 2n . In an ideal case, the
log2 (m)log2 (Si (q)) curves are strict straight lines, and the
sample size in each LS estimate can be a minimum of two,
i.e., N = 2. In actual systems, the LS estimate is affected by
noise, so larger sample size means stabler estimate. However,
larger N means larger computation burden and poorer real-time
performance. To balance these factors, a simple experiment was
carried out to determine a proper N to derive a reasonable
estimate of (). It is clear from the result shown in Fig. 8
that the () estimates of the clutter and target converge to two
fixed values, respectively, as the number of points increases.
When the sample size in each LS estimate reaches 11, i.e., N
reaches 1024, the estimates become stable. Thus, we choose
the optimal number N for our integral test to be 2048 or 4096 to
ensure that N is large enough to give an accurate result while, at

Integral test () against sample size.

the same time, not so large that the computational time becomes
too long.
Since sea clutter changes a lot with sea state, the existing
simulation methods such as Monte Carlo simulation cannot
describe the complexity of sea clutter effectively. The analysis
with real data is more credible. However, researchers can
hardly get enough real data with variable SCR, which leads
to systemless conclusions. In our work, we construct new sea
clutter series from real data as follows.
1) Mark the pure sea clutter series as C = [C1 , C2 , . . . ,
CN ], where N is the length of the series.
2) Mark the sea clutter series with targets as X = [X1 ,
X2 , . . . , XN ].
3) Construct the new series Z = C + X = [C1 , C2 , . . . ,
CN ] + [X1 , X2 , . . . , XN ], where [0, +).
4) The SCR of the new series increases as varies from
zero to +. Z becomes X when +, and Z
degenerates to C when = 0.
Because the target and the clutter in X cannot be completely
separated from each other and the noise is unavoidable, it is
impossible to calculate the accurate SCR. Suppose that X is a
pure target echo and there is no noise in X or C; we then get an


approximate SCR of Z as follows:



SCR =

PX
PC

(9)

where PX and PC are the power of X and the power of C,

respectively. As the power of clutter in X is ignored in (9),


SCR is certainly smaller than the accurate SCR.

Fig. 9 shows the change in the mean values of box-counting


dimension and integral test () with SCR ranging from 20

to 70 dB, while the length of utilized series in each calculation


is 2048. From Fig. 9, we can see that, with the increase in SCR,
the values of box-counting dimension and integral test () of
Z tend to those of X.
To draw a comparison between our new method and traditional moving target detection methods, the rangeDoppler
spectrum image (in decibels) for sea clutter in range bins
22002550, calculated by 512 pulses, is shown in Fig. 10.
Fig. 11 shows the ratio of the peak value of the Doppler


frequency of targets to that of sea clutter with SCR ranging

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LUO et al.: FRACTAL PROPERTIES OF SEA CLUTTER AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN TARGET DETECTION

IV. C ONCLUSION

Fig. 9.

Change in box-counting dimension and integral test () with

SCR.

This letter has analyzed the fractal characteristics of real sea

clutter and has studied the differences between pure sea clutter
and sea clutter with targets. An integral test of multifractal
spectra is utilized to detect targets within sea clutter. After constructing new sea clutter series with variable SCR from real sea
clutter, we have shown that detecting methods based on fractal
analysis are effective at a very low SCR. Moreover, detailed
characteristics of fractal properties of sea clutter are carried out,
including the fractal differences between targets and clutter, the
relationship between the box-counting dimension and SCR, the
relationship between the integral test and SCR, and the change
of fractal features with the length of utilized series in each
calculation. It is difficult to detect maritime targets robustly just
using one single feature. In this case, combined features may be
a good idea to obtain better detection performance, which will
be studied in our further research.
R EFERENCES

Fig. 10. RangeDoppler spectrum image (in decibels) of radar echoes.

Fig. 11. Ratio of the peak value of the Doppler frequency of target to that of
sea clutter.

from 20 to 70 dB. The peak value of targets is lower than



that of sea clutter until SCR reaches about 3.5 dB. From Fig. 9,
we can see that () of targets is obviously lower than that


of clutter even when the SCR is less than 0 dB, which means
that fractal methods can detect targets at a very low SCR while
traditional methods become ineffective under this condition.

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