TSINGHUA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ISSNll1007-0214ll14/16llpp228-234
Volume 15, Number 2, April 2010

Radar Sea Clutter Suppression and Target Indication

with a Spatial Tracking Filter

LIU Jingyao (刘婧瑶), MENG Huadong (孟华东)**, ZHANG Hao (张 颢), WANG Xiqin (王希勤)

Intelligent Transportation Information System Laboratory,

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Abstract: It is an important issue to study sea clutter suppression because it could interfere with the detec-
tion of targets above the sea surface severely. Spatial spectrum analyses show that the majority of sea clut-
ter has low-frequency characteristics, compared to the high-frequency characteristics of the targets. This
paper proposes a frequency-based spatial tracking filter to suppress sea clutter to facilitate targets identifica-
tion. Experimental results show that the signal-to-clutter ratio can increase by more than 10 dB after filtering
and the algorithm is feasible for practical use. In addition, the filtering equation can be optimized to maxi-
mize the signal-to-clutter ratio improvement. The equation parameters can also be adjusted to give a proper
cut-off frequency for different targets and clutter.

Key words: spatial spectrum; spatial tracking filter; sea clutter suppression; target indication

trails. Thus, Weibull[1], log-normal[2], K[3], and com-

Introduction pound-Gaussian[4] distributions have received the most
attention to describe sea clutter amplitude in recent
Sea clutter, or sea echo, refers to the backscattered re-
years. Fractals have also been used for a deeper under-
turns from a patch of sea surface illuminated by a
standing of the sea clutter characteristics to model the
transmitted radar signal. Robust detection of low ob-
sea surface roughness[5]. The possible chaotic behavior
servable targets within sea clutter is quite important for
of sea clutter has also been studied[6].
coastal and national security since objects within sea
Since the ultimate goal of sea clutter studies is to
clutter may include submarine periscopes, low-flying
improve the detection of targets embedded within the
aircraft, missiles, small marine vessels, and small
sea clutter, much effort has been made to design target
pieces of ice. Furthermore, sea clutter may vary with
detection filters. For example, time-frequency analysis
the radar polarization mode, working frequency, an-
techniques[7] and wavelet-based approaches[8] have
tenna visual angle, sea state, and wind direction, so it
also been proposed in the transform domain. The neu-
severely limits radar detection capability.
ral network approach[9] has been used based on the
Traditionally, sea clutter is studied in terms of sim-
inherent nonlinearity of the clutter signal. Fractal di-
ple statistical features and modeled as a random proc-
mensions[10] and boxing-counting multifractal analy-
ess. However, the non-Gaussian nature of sea clutter
ses[11] have been proposed to model the signal texture.
causes the empirical distributions calculated from ex-
Chaotic systems[12] are used to analyze sea clutter and
perimental data to exhibit significant deviations and
target signals due to the similarity to chaotic behavior.
Received: 2009-03-06; revised: 2009-10-25 The different spatial characteristics of sea clutter and
** To whom correspondence should be addressed. targets also allow for implementation of subspace
E-mail: menghd@tsinghua.edu.cn; Tel: 86-10-62781378 methods[13] for sea clutter suppression. In addition,
 LIU Jingyao (刘婧瑶) et al.：Radar Sea Clutter Suppression and Target Indication …
some researchers have even resorted to more powerful
millimeter wave radar with higher resolution to im-
prove detection accuracy. This field would benefit
strongly from analyses of a large number of datasets
measured for various sea and weather conditions to
design a few readily computable parameters to accu-
rately and easily detect targets within sea clutter.
This paper presents a spatial tracking filter based on
the Kalman filter to separate targets from sea clutter in
the frequency domain rather than a model to describe
sea clutter that is adaptable to every situation.
1 Characteristics of Sea Surface and
Targets
Qualitatively, the basic characteristics of sea surface
include superimposed ripples, foam, and splashing
spray onto large-scale, approximately periodic waves.
The waves are large-scale structures, while the splash-
ing ripples and spray are small-scale structures. The
waves are generated by wind from a distance as ap-
proximately sinusoidal waves with long wavelengths.
The ripples and spray are generated by interferance
between different kinds of swells and the wind, both
leading to irregular sea surface patterns.
The sea clutter data analyzed here was recorded on
the East China Sea from an incoherent radar system
operating in the X-band. The system emits 3600 pulses
per round with each pulse representing 0.1° . The
sampling rate of the recording instrument is 35 MHz.
Since the radar emits pulses in the radial direction, the
radial direction can be used as the time axis with the
sea clutter regarded as a time varying signal. The echo
intensity of sea clutter in the radial distance in a spe-
cific direction is shown in Fig. 1. The spatial spectrum
Fig. 1 Echo intensity of sea clutter in one direction
229
of the sea clutter is shown in Fig. 2. The intensity of
the frequency at each time was calculated using
short-time Fourier transform with different colors to
represent the intensities.
Fig. 2 Spatial spectrum of the sea clutter in Fig. 1
As shown in Fig. 1, the small-scale sea clutter
structures are quite irregular compared to the large-
scale structures, with the large-scale structures having
a low frequency (almost direct current) which is rela-
tively stable. Since the low-frequency component is
much stronger than the high-frequency component of
the echo, it is the principal factor affecting target indi-
cation. However, the leading front of the target echo is
much steeper with a higher frequency than the
large-scale sea clutter structure. Also, the target echo
power is much stronger than the small-scale structure
echo. These two features both indicate a good method
to separate the sea clutter from the target signal is to
filter their spatial frequency spectra and then compare
the relative powers. Figure 2 shows that the frequency
of the large scale structure is concentrated below 1
MHz, while the frequencies of the small scale structure
and the target are higher — up to 4 MHz. In addition,
the sea clutter near the radar has higher frequencies
than the clutter far away. The data in Fig. 1 shows that
the echo from near the radar is large enough to saturate
the receiver, so the minimum target detection distance
is about 200 m for this radar system.
2 Designing a Spatial Tracking Filter
The data in Fig. 1 shows that a high-pass filter is
needed to suppress the low frequency components of
the sea clutter. A low-pass filter can be used to select
the large-scale component of the sea clutter which is
 230
then subtracted from the original signal to remove the
clutter and indicate the target. The dynamics of the
nonstationary sea clutter echo can be modeled as a dis-
crete time Markov signal with the large-scale compo-
nent plotted in Fig. 3. Here Ae denotes the estimated
sea clutter amplitude, Se denotes the estimated slope
of sea clutter amplitude, Ap denotes the predicted
amplitude, Sp denotes the predicted slope, Am de-
notes the measured sea clutter amplitude, and T de-
notes the sample interval.
Fig. 3 Large-scale structure of the sea clutter
Since the large-scale structure of sea clutter changes
slowly, the slope of the sea clutter amplitude remains
constant during a tiny sample interval as follows.
Equation (1) is called the slope predicting equation.
Sp (n) = Se (n − 1) (1)
With this assumption, the amplitude of the sea clut-
ter can be easily predicted. However, the sea clutter
amplitude curve is convex as shown in Fig. 3 and the
second derivative is always negative. Since the slope is
always deceasing, the slope is multiplied by a fac-
tor α (less than 1) to solve the problem. Equation (2) is
called the amplitude predicting equation.
Ap (n) = Ae (n − 1) + α ∙Se (n − 1)∙T (2)
Equation (2) does not actually give a linearly decreas-
ing slope, but is useful for the large-scale structures, as
will be shown with real data in Section 4.
Thus, the dynamics process of sea clutter has been
modeled by a linear model with the hypothesis in Eq.
(2). The Kalman filter is the optimal filter to minimize
the mean squared error for a class of linear estimators.
Take [ Ae , Se ] as a two-dimensional target state vector
and estimate the amplitude and slope with a Kalman
filter with constant gain as follows[14]. Equation (3) is
the amplitude estimating equation and Eq. (4) is the
Tsinghua Science and Technology, April 2010, 15(2): 228-234
slope estimating equation.
Ae (n) = Ap (n) + β ∙( Am (n) − Ap (n)) (3)
γ
Se (n) = Sp (n) + ∙( Am (n) − Ap (n)) (4)
T
Figure 3 shows that the estimated amplitude Ae
must fall between Ap (n) and Am (n), and must be
closer to the one with the higher reliability, so β
must be less than 1. Moreover, due to the uncertainty
in T , Se (n)∙T and Sp (n)∙T are replaced by Se (n)
and S p (n) to eliminate T . The calculations then
showed that γ is always so large that it is impossible
to analyze the influences of all three parameters on the
filter performance. Therefore, Eq. (4) was rewritten as
Eq. (5),
Se (n) = Sp (n) + γ ∙( Am (n) − Ap (n) − S p (n)) (5)
with 0 < γ < 1 , the same as α and β . The whole fil-
tering algorithm based on Eqs. (1) - (5) can then be
written with three adjustable parameters as the α -β -γ
filter.
⎧ Ap (n) = Ae (n − 1) + α ∙Se (n − 1),
⎪
⎨ Ae (n) = Ap (n) + β ∙( Am (n) − Ap (n)), (6)
⎪
⎩ Se (n) = Sp (n) + γ ∙( Am (n) − Ap (n) − Sp (n))
The result of the data in Fig. 1 being filtered to re-
move the sea clutter is shown by the dotted line in
Fig. 4 using α = 0.04, β = 0.0045, and γ =0.2. The
results show that Ae accurately estimates the low-fre-
quency component of the sea clutter.
Fig. 4 Estimated sea clutter amplitude
3 Performance Analysis and
Parameter Selection
The performance of the spatial tracking filter for
 LIU Jingyao (刘婧瑶) et al.：Radar Sea Clutter Suppression and Target Indication … 231

clutter suppression and target indication was analyzed frequency. Proper selection requires understanding of
from two perspectives: the filter cut-off frequency and the influences of the three parameters on the filter
the improvement in the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR). cut-off frequency. The dependence of the cut-off fre-
The parameters were adjusted to give different cut-off quency on each parameter was analyzed by increasing
frequencies for different conditions as well as the op- each parameter gradually from zero to one while
timal parameters for a given direction. keeping the other two constant. For β = 0.0045 and
γ = 0.2 , the cut-off frequency is plotted as a function of
3.1 Filter cut-off frequency
α in Fig. 6a. For α = 0.04 and γ = 0.2, the cut-off
Usually, the variations in the sea clutter and the target
are both reflected in the frequency domain. The main
function of the spatial tracking filter is to extract the
low-frequency component of the sea clutter; thus, it
should also be a low-pass filter. Suppose that the input
signal is Am and the output is Ae , and the system
reaches steady state instantaneously. The Z-transform
of Eq. (6) gives:
⎧ Ap ( Z ) = Z −1∙ Ae ( Z ) + α ∙Z −1∙Se ( Z ),
⎪
⎨ Ae ( Z ) = Ap ( Z ) + β ∙( Am ( Z ) − Ap ( Z )), (7)
⎪
⎩ Se ( Z ) = Sp ( Z ) + γ ∙( Am ( Z ) − Ap ( Z ) − Sp ( Z )) (a)
The solution of this equation gives:
A (Z )
H (Z ) = e =
Am ( Z )
β + (α ∙γ − β + β ∙γ ) Z −1
(8)
1 + (α ∙γ + β + γ − 2) Z −1 + (1 − β − γ + β ∙γ ) Z −2
where H is the system function of the filter. The
frequency response is shown in Fig. 5 for α = 0.04,
β = 0.0045, and γ = 0.2 . The cut-off frequency of the
filter is 0.49 MHz.

(b)

Fig. 5 Frequency response of the α -β -γ filter with

α = 0.04, β = 0.0045, and γ = 0.2
(c)
Figure 5 confirms the importance of the low-pass
filter. Account differentiation of the different frequen- Fig. 6 Influence of parameters on the 3 dB band-
width (a) α for β =0.0045 and γ =0.2 ， (b) β for α =
cies for the target and the sea clutter requires that the
0.04 and γ = 0.2 , (c) γ for α = 0.04 and β = 0.0045
parameters be adjusted to give a proper filter cut-off
 232 Tsinghua Science and Technology, April 2010, 15(2): 228-234

frequency is plotted as a function of β in Fig. 6b. ( Am (nT ) − Ae (nT ))2

SCR out = (10)
For α = 0.04 and β = 0.0045 , the cut-off frequency is ∑ ( Am (n) − Ae (n))2
plotted as a function of γ in Fig. 6c. n ≠ nT

The filter bandwidth gradually increases with α , where nT represents the target location. Here, the
remains nearly constant with γ , and increases sharply target is treated as a point source, neglecting its size.
with β . Thus, α is the most important tuning pa- The SCR improvement can be expressed by Eq. (11).
rameter to choose a proper cut-off frequency for vari- SCR improvement = 10lg(SCR out /SCR in ) (11)
ous target and clutter conditions. Since nT is unknown, SCR improvement can not be cal-
Therefore, the cut-off frequency can be changed for
different characteristics of sea clutter and target. If the culated directly, but the analysis can be simplified by
cut-off frequency is too high, some high-frequency three assumptions.
targets will pass through the filter and be suppressed (1) Am (nT ) is unknown but constant for various
along with the sea clutter; however, if the cut-off fre- choices of the three parameters, so Am (nT ) will be set
quency is too low, some of the low-frequency clutter to A0 .
may still remain after the filter with the targets. The (2) ( Am (nT ) − Ae (nT )) is the target amplitude after
system can not calculate the proper cut-off frequency suppression of the sea clutter, so it should be maxi-
for each frame (in each direction) due to the time- mized along the radial direction for target indication.
consuming calculations. Therefore, the best parameter (3) If the target power is much less than the total
should be selected in advance for the entire system. As
a compromise, a set of fixed parameters applicable to clutter power, then ∑A
n ≠ nT
m (n)2 can be replaced by
different sea clutter conditions should retain as much
target information as possible in the filter output and ∑An
m
2
(n) and ∑ (A
n ≠ nT
m (n) − Ae (n))2 can be replaced
reduce the low-frequency sea clutter. Therefore, the
filter need only suppress the large-scale structure of sea
by ∑(A
n
m (n) − Ae (n))2 .

clutter, leaving the small-scale and target signals. So, Then, Eqs. (9) and (10) will be replaced by Eqs. (12)
the cut-off frequency for the spatial tracking filter and (13), and the SCR calculation is independent of the
should be selected based on sea clutter and target char- target position nT .
acteristics. The parameters used here (α = 0.04, A02
β = 0.0045, γ =0.2 ) correspond to a cut-off frequency SCR in = (12)
of 0.49 MHz, which is low enough to retain the ∑A
n
m ( n) 2

target and high-frequency clutter while removing

(max( Am (n) − Ae (n)))2
the large-scale sea clutter. Different sea surface SCR out = n
(13)
and target conditions may require different cut-off
∑(A m (n) − Ae (n)) 2

frequencies. n

A genetic algorithm was used to get the maximum of

3.2 SCR improvement the improvement in SCR which occurred at α = 0.999,
The combination of the three parameters can thus be β = 0.992, and γ = 0.721. The data before and after
optimized to achieve the best clutter suppression and filtering are shown in Figs. 7 and 8.
target indication. The norm is to maximize the im- These parameters retained most of the sea clutter
provement in the signal-to-clutter ratio. Since the sea signal, but with an obvious target signal at 874.28 m.
clutter is regarded as a discrete signal, the sum of the SCR in is −22.89 dB, SCR out is −10.64 dB, and
square of the signal amplitude can be used to represent SCR improvement is 12.25 dB. The results show that the
the signal power. The signal-to-clutter ratios before and filtering algorithm with the optimal parameters sig-
after filtering are expressed by: nificantly increases the SCR and is quite effective for
A (n )2 target indication. These optimal values for target indi-
SCR in = m T (9)
cation are for one frame of echo data, with large varia-
∑ Am (n)
n≠ nT
2
tions of the optimal values for different frames. Values
 LIU Jingyao (刘婧瑶) et al.：Radar Sea Clutter Suppression and Target Indication … 233

results in some cases, especially in regions near the

radar source, which may cause some small targets to be
lost within the sea clutter. This will be analyzed more
in the future studies.

Fig. 7 Measured and filtered data of sea clutter for α =

0.999, β = 0.992, and γ = 0.721

Fig. 9 Target and sea clutter signals after filtering

Figure 10 shows the grayscale images from an entire

360° before and after the spatial tracking filter. Figure
10a shows strong reflections mixed with the targets

Fig. 8 Output of the spatial tracking filter for α =

0.999, β = 0.992, and γ = 0.721
designed for this frame may completely obscuse the
target for another frame. Therefore, relatively conser-
vative values are normally selected to suppress the sea
clutter in practice, for example α = 0.04, β = 0.0045,
and γ =0.2 .
(a) Before filtering

4 Experimental Results
The spatial tracking filter was used here with real data
to evaluate the sea clutter suppression and target indi-
cation. The filtered data from Fig. 1 is shown in Fig. 9
using the conservative parameters corresponding to the
0.49 MHz cut-off frequency. The low-frequency large-
scale structure of sea clutter is almost eliminated, with
the high-frequency components and the target remain-
ing. Even in the presence of the high-frequency sea
clutter, the target can still be clearly distinguished from
the clutter since the powers differ greatly. This result (b) After filtering
shows that the hypothesis and derivation in Section 2 o
Fig. 10 360 grayscale image before and after fil-
are both correct. However, both the target and sea tering with α = 0.04, β = 0.0045, and γ = 0.2
clutter power are reduced by the filter, with negative
 234
and clutter signals. Figure 10b shows that most of the
sea clutter signals have been removed, with only some
weak points left. There are 3-5 targets at this moment
and with more scans needed to observe target move-
ment to finalize the decision making process.
5 Conclusions
The spatial and frequency characteristics of sea clutter
and sea targets was analyzed to show that the large-
scale structure, which dominates the sea echo, is pri-
marily a low-frequency signal, while the targets and
the small-scale structure of sea clutter are mostly high
frequency. A spatial tracking filter was then developed
to suppress the low-frequency part of the sea clutter
signal, leaving the high-frequency parts and the target
data. The remaining high-frequency data can be ana-
lyzed to distinguish the targets because of the different
power characteristics of the targets and the sea clutter.
The three filtering parameters were then adjusted to
give an appropriate cut-off frequency for the entire
system according to the sea clutter and target condi-
tions. The SCR improvement was then maximized to
find the optimal values of the three parameters for the
best clutter suppression and target indication. Finally,
real experiments from single direction and 360° sig-
nals showed that most of the sea clutter was removed
with clear distinctions between the targets and the re-
maining weak clutter. This paper replaces the tradi-
tional sea clutter modeling with analysis of the distinc-
tion between the spatial spectrum and power levels of
the targets and the sea clutter. The spatial tracking filter
realizes clutter suppression and target indication. The
experiments provide good results that support the hy-
pothesis in a practical spatial tracking filter.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dr. Liu Yujing and SVA Communication
Technology Co., LTD for providing the sea clutter data and for
their valuable comments and helpful suggestions.
References
[1] Fay F S, Clarke J, Peters R S. Weibull distribution applied
to sea-clutter. In: IEE Conf. Publication, Radar’77. London,
Tsinghua Science and Technology, April 2010, 15(2): 228-234
England, 1977: 101-103.
[2] Trunk G V, George S F. Detection of targets in non-Gaus-
sian sea clutter. IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and
Electronic System, 1970, 6(5): 620-628.
[3] Gini F, Montanari M, Verrazzani L. Maximum likelihood,
esprit, and periodgram frequency estimation of radar sig-
nals in K-distributed clutter. Signal Processing, 2000,
80(6): 1115-1126.
[4] Gini F. Performance analysis of two structured covariance
matrix estimator in compound Gaussian clutter. Signal
Processing, 2000, 80(2): 365-371.
[5] Berizzi F, Dalle-Mese E. Scattering from a 2-D sea fractal
surface: Fractal analysis of the scattered signal. IEEE
Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 2002, 50(7):
912-925.
[6] Leung H, Lo T. Chaotic radar signal processing over the
sea. IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 1993, 18(3):
287-295.
[7] Thayaparan T, Kennedy S. Detection of a maneuvering air
target in sea clutter using joint time-frequency analysis
techniques. IEE Proceedings Radar, Sonar and Navigation,
2004, 151(1): 19-30.
[8] Davidson G, Griffiths H D. Wavelet detection scheme for
small targets in sea clutter. Electronics Letters, 2002,
38(19): 1128-1130.
[9] Leung H, Dubash N, Xie N. Detection of small objects in
clutter using a GA-RBF neural network. IEEE Transac-
tions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, 2002, 38(1):
98-118.
[10] Berizzi F, Dalle-Mese E. Fractal analysis of the signal
scattered from the sea surface. IEEE Transactions on An-
tennas and Propagation, 1999, 47(2): 324-338.
[11] Gan D, Zhang S H. Detection of sea-surface radar targets
based on multifractal analysis. Electronics Letters, 2000,
36(13): 1144-1145.
[12] Nan He, Haykin S. Chaotic modeling of sea clutter. Elec-
tronics Letters, 1992, 28(22): 2076-2077.
[13] Sira S P, Cochran D, Papandreou A. A subspace-based
approach to sea clutter suppression for improved target de-
tection. In: Fourtieth Asilomar Conference on Signals,
Systems and Computers. Arizona, USA, 2006: 752-756.
[14] Blackman S, Popoli R. Design and Analysis of Modern
Tracking Systems. Norwood, MA, USA: Artech House,
1999: 147-163.