Radar clutter attractor: implications for physics, signal processing and control

A disscussion is present on the chaotic dynamics of sea clutter in the light of current knowledge about chaos theory. The discussion builds on experimental results reported by Haykin and Puthusserypady (1997, 1999) on the chaotic dynamics of sea clutter under varying environmental conditions and on the dynamic reconstruction of sea clutter using a regularised radial-basis function network (Haykin et al., 1998). The experimental results presented are for a marine radar operating at low grazing angles. The implications of the chaotic dynamics of sea clutter are discussed in the context of physical aspects of sea clutter, simulation of sea clutter and the detection of a target signal embedded in sea clutter and the stability of the predictive model used to perform the dynamic reconstruction of sea clutter.