Analysis of high-resolution land clutter

Results are presented of an analysis of land clutter from the fixed site high-resolution BYSON radar at Malvern. Digital terrain elevation data are used to determine the imaged ground regions and the normalised-log estimator U is measured to investigate the stability of the long-tailed clutter distribution. Operational target detectors must maintain a constant false alarm rate over the entire scene, but small areas of non-Gaussian backscatter cause the majority of false alarms. To overcome this, a variable CFAR detector is tested and compared to standard CA and CAGO processors. The performance of the empirically determined variable CFAR is superior, but results suggest that there is no simple statistical model for land clutter of this kind as the false alarms within a particular scene are strongly correlated with the environment.