Simulation of spatially-temporally correlated radar sea clutter with generalized inverse Gaussian texture

A comprehensive assessment of the performance of maritime radar needs to rely on sea clutter data with different characteristics. However, the limitations of radar field tests lead to the fact that measured sea clutter data with different characteristics are often difficult to obtain. In practice, the problem of limited sea clutter data can be effectively solved by computer simulation. For the sea clutter simulation problem, this paper investigates the sea clutter simulation method with spatial correlation, temporal correlation and variable non-Gaussianity. Firstly, through the statistical analysis of the measured sea clutter data, it is concluded that the temporal correlation of sea clutter in a short time is determined by its speckle component, the spatial correlation is determined by its texture component, and the non-Gaussian property is determined by the probability distribution of the texture component. Based on the aforementioned sea clutter properties and the theory of spherically invariant stochastic processes, a sea clutter simulation method with generalized inverse Gaussian texture and spatial-temporal correlation is proposed. Finally, the proposed simulation method is evaluated experimentally, and the experimental results show that the proposed sea clutter simulation method can effectively simulate sea clutter with generalized inverse Gaussian texture and spatial-temporal correlation.