A novel simulation method of ground clutter for airborne pulse Doppler radars

A novel simulation method of ground clutter for airborne pulse Doppler (PD) radars is proposed. The method is based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation aiming at efficient simulation of time-domain signal with natural scene. It is applicable only to distributed ground clutter. In this method, the backscatter coefficient is obtained from SAR image data and the simulation is operated in the Fourier transformed domain rather than the time domain. Range-Doppler 2-dimension clutter spectrums and the comparison between the fast and time-domain methods are presented to show the validity and efficiency of this method. Finally, comments for further development of the fast simulation method are discussed.