Clutter Modeling for FOD Surveillance Radar at Low Grazing Angle

Abstract

Foreign object debris (FOD) surveillance radar is used to detect the potential objects which threats the safety of flights. Since the performance of ground based surveillance radar is inevitably restricted by the clutter even the echoes from the runway and grassland of the airport are much stronger than that from tiny FOD, current FOD detection methods are mainly based on clutter modeling and uses backscattering coefficients. In this paper we propose a novel FOD clutter modeling method, which generates the ground distributed clutter by using the back scattering coefficient spatial correlated model. In this model, the amplitude of the clutter is non-Rayleigh distributed and the power spectrum density obeys the Gaussian distribution. Concretely, the runway clutter amplitude applies Weibull distribution and the grassland clutter amplitude adopts Log-normal distribution. The proposed method builds the model under the full consideration of low grazing angle geometry relations and characteristics of FOD surveillance radar. The experiments on the millimeter wave FOD radar experiment data demonstrate the effectiveness of the model. This proposed modeling method provides a fulfilling acquisition for further targets detection process.