Static clutter estimation under phase noise

In this paper, a simple clutter estimation method is suggested to estimate the complex clutter signal of a single range cell, when the observations are perturbed with phase noise and the clutter is not moving. The suggested estimator, i.e. the averaging estimator, neglects the phase noise in the observation and gives the maximum likelihood estimator of clutter under this assumption. The mean square error of the averaging estimator is found analitically in this paper. The estimator is compared with the maximum likelihood and the maximum aposteriori estimation of clutter in the mean square error sense. Though it is much simpler than the others, the average estimator is shown to have almost the same MSE perforformance as the other estimators.