A nonlinear compound representation of sea clutter

We explore the applicability of our recently developed Nonlinear Compound Gaussian (NCG) [1] distribution to modeling the statistics of sea clutter data. We first, for completeness, give a self-contained description of our NCG distribution; both its theoretical properties and the algorithmic details for parameter estimation. We then demonstrate the performance of NCG in modeling the range statistics of sea-clutter data [12]. The results clearly demonstrate the superiority of NCG in modeling sea-clutter phenomena over the compound Gaussian (CG) distribution. We conclude with a brief discussion of a phenomenological interpretation of these results together with directions for future research.