Chaos, sea clutter, and neural networks

The notion that a deterministic nonlinear dynamical system (with relatively few degrees of freedom) can display aperiodic behavior has a strong bearing on sea clutter characterization: random-looking sea clutter may be the outcome of a chaotic process. This new approach envisages deterministic rules for the underlying sea clutter dynamics, in contrast to the stochastic approach where sea clutter is viewed as a random process with a large number of degrees of freedom. Haykin and Puthusserypady (see Chaos, vol.7, 1997) have demonstrated, convincingly for the first time, the chaotic dynamics of sea clutter. In this paper, we present highlights of this experimental work and related research.