Characterizing Sea Clutter and Detecting Targets via Surrogate Test

The surrogate test has been extensively employed in testing the nonlinear characteristics of time series. In this paper, surrogate tests are applied to the real-life IPIX radar data to detect targets within sea clutter. Surrogate tests show that sea clutter represents nonlinear tendency while the echoes of small targets show linear tendency. With their different physical properties, the small targets are detected reliably from sea clutter. Comparative experiments show that the proposed method is more accurate and robust than the detrended fluctuation analysis.