Clutter Components Research Articles

Ground penetrating radar clutter suppression based on the weighted tensor Schatten p-paradigm minimization of tensor principal components

The issue of clutter suppression in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) detection has consistently been a prominent area of research. The existing tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) approach encounters a challenge when handling different singular values, whereby all singular values are reduced to the same degree, leading to loss of information in the low-rank part. To address the aforementioned issues, this study developed a TRPCA method based on weighted tensor Schatten p-paradigm minimisation (p-TRPCA). This approach assigns distinct weights to each singular value by using a weighted tensor Schatten p-paradigm, facilitating the optimal decomposition of GPR data into low-rank clutter and sparse target components. The processing of target echoes is then completed by applying a threshold judgement to the results. The efficacy of the proposed method was validated through simulations and real-world testing. Its performance was benchmarked against established advanced clutter removal techniques in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and signal-to-clutter ratio. The findings demonstrated that the method effectively delineated the low-rank clutter matrix and sparse target matrix within the B-scan image and exhibited superior SNR compared to other methods.

Tensor structure-based ground clutter suppression approaches for pulse doppler radar

ABSTRACT For pulse doppler (PD) radar, two tensor structure-based methods are proposed to improve the clutter suppression performance. One is tensor singular value decomposition (TSVD) and the other is tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA). Two algorithms both stack the range-Doppler matrices of multiple coherent processing intervals (CPI) into a tensor structure, which helps make the most of the temporal information across CPIs. TSVD utilizes the strong temporal correlation of ground clutter data to estimate the clutter subspace. Meanwhile, TRPCA exactly separates both low-rank clutter component and sparse target components from the time series range-Doppler tensor structure. Experimental results indicate that compared with conventional matrix-based schemes such as singular value decomposition (SVD) or singular value decomposition (RPCA), the proposed methods have significant advantages in keeping the target echo while suppressing the clutter. In addition, the computational complexity of each algorithm is analysed in detail.

Low-cost solutions for mobile passive radar based on multichannel DPCA and NULA configurations

Abstract In this paper, we investigate low-cost solutions for enabling ground moving target indication applications with multichannel mobile passive radar systems. As known, in order to be competitive with their active counterparts, passive radars are typically characterized by severe constraints in terms of cost, complexity, and compactness, especially when installed on moving platforms. On the one hand, carrying out the computations onboard requires processing techniques as simple as possible. On the other hand, the need for lightweight and compact systems that can be installed on a moving platform requires using a limited number of receiving channels. To meet these requirements, we propose a series of nonadaptive detectors based on multichannel displaced phase center antennas, which allow suppressing the Doppler-spread clutter component without requiring computationally intensive space–time adaptive processing techniques. Moreover, we explore the use of nonuniformly spaced array configurations on receive, which represent a good alternative to conventional uniform linear arrays when a limited number of receiving channels can be implemented. The effectiveness of the proposed processing techniques and antenna design solutions is demonstrated via numerical analysis for the case of a DVB-T-based mobile passive radar system.

Range-Ambiguous Sea Clutter Suppression for Multichannel Spaceborne Radar Applications Via Alternating APC Processing

In this article, a novel range ambiguous cluter suppression method, i.e., alternating azitmuth phase coding (AAPC), based on azimuth phase coding (APC) is proposed, where the blind areas of target detection are solved. Based on the motion model of spaceborne radar (SBR) system, the sea clutter motion property is analyzed, and a multichannel sea clutter signal model with the consideration of range ambiguity is established. After that, the novel method AAPC is proposed. Finally, a time-domain sliding window projection method with the consideration of clutter internal motions is proposed to realize the sea clutter rejection. Compared with the current range-ambiguous sea clutter suppression algorithms, the improvements of this method are: 1) the range-ambiguous clutter can be separated and most of the clutter components in the main-lobe region can be rejected; and 2) the repetitive detection blind regions can be avoided by applying the proposed AAPC technique. Simulation results are presented to validate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

Effective Non-Stationary Clutter Suppression Method via Elevation Oblique Subspace Projection for Moving Targets Detection with a Space-Based Surveillance Radar

The clutter becomes non-stationary for a space-based surveillance radar (SBSR), which is harmful for the moving targets detection due to the earth’s rotation. The non-stationarity will degrade the accuracy of clutter covariance matrix (CCM) estimation and increase the clutter degree of freedom (DOF), thereby degrading the performance of clutter suppression. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel non-stationary clutter suppression method using an elevation oblique subspace projection method. After analyzing the range ambiguity and non-stationarity of the clutter, the proposed method utilized the oblique projection matrix to project the signal onto the subspace spanned by the near-range and far-range clutter components along the subspace spanned by the main lobe clutter component. Then, the projected signal was used to estimate the elevation covariance matrix and calculate the optimal weight vector for the elevation adaptive filter. The proposed method can suppress the non-stationary clutter effectively with a higher improvement factor (IF) and a narrower main lobe width. Finally, the simulation results were given to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.

A sea clutter suppression algorithm for over-the-horizon radar based on dictionary learning and subspace estimation

Detecting a ship target by over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) is seriously affected by sea clutter. This paper proposes a clutter suppression algorithm based on dictionary learning and subspace estimation (DLSE). First, the K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) is used for dictionary learning and sparse representation of the sea clutter. Then, the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is used to reconstruct the sea clutter component to suppress the outliers. Finally, the clutter covariance matrix is calculated using the reconstructed clutter spectrum, and the clutter subspace of the covariance matrix is estimated to achieve clutter suppression. In this paper, the K-SVD is improved to preserve the phase information of the complex signal. The sea clutter spectrum, after sparse representation and reconstruction, is not impacted by outliers in neighboring cells. Therefore, the clutter covariance matrix has a better estimate accuracy than existing subspace decomposition algorithm. The adaptive parameter estimate method also enhances the adaptability of the DLSE. The experimental results of real data demonstrate that the DLSE is as sophisticated as existing subspace decomposition algorithms while having a higher output signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) and peak-to-side lobe ratio (PSLR), improving about 2-5 dB. Results of outlier suppression attest to the robustness of the DLSE. Under various coherent integration times (CIT) and frequencies, the DLSE has the best clutter suppression performance among the comparison algorithms.

Multi-Person Position Estimation Based on Correlation Between Received Signals Using MIMO FMCW Radar

By using Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar, a range-angle map can be obtained that displays the signal strength in two dimensions with respect to distance and angular directions. In this process, a threshold algorithm such as Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) is used to detect positions where the signal strength exceeds a certain threshold value, enabling position estimation of targets. Furthermore, a method has been proposed to use the curve length of the trajectory of the I/Q signal to emphasize the signal of the person’s position on the range angle map. However, the conventional CFAR may cause false alarms when noise and clutter signals are strong. In this paper, we propose a new method for human location estimation using the MIMO FMCW radar. Comparing the reflected signals from people and clutter, we see that I/Q signal variations associated with human motion have little correlation with clutter from stationary objects or noise, and I/Q signal variations associated with clutter often have high correlation with signals at other positions. We focus on the fact that there are many positions where the clutter component signal has a high correlation, compared to the signal caused by a person. Using the correlation map that expresses the correlation between the received I/Q signals on the range-angle plane, we evaluated the characteristics of noise and clutter components from walls on the correlation map by standard deviation. As a result, we can remove strong noise and clutter components caused from near walls, thus improving the accuracy of object location estimation.

Chaotic Behavior Analysis and Multifractal Feature Learning of Specular Reflection Ionosphere Clutter for Target Detection

Because ionosphere condition is dynamically varying in the Earth’s middle-latitude, the long-range detection performance of operating high frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) systems is severely restricted by the presence of ionosphere clutter. The development and performance evaluation of target detection under the F-layer specular reflection ionosphere clutter with concentrated power (Fs-concentrated clutter) will be described in this paper. First, this article pays attention to the variable chaotic behavior of Fs-concentrated clutter by using amplitude and phase echo data. Then, this article investigates the multifractal property of the power spectrum between the Fs-concentrated clutter and mixed echo component. The various fractal characteristics of different types of echo component and Doppler scale are analyzed. Next, the singularity intensity correlation function width, the accumulation area of multifractal correlation spectrum and asymmetry parameter are extracted as the learning features. These multifractal feature parameters are fed into the improved AlexNet and Resnet networks for distinguishing the types of echo component. Experimental results using real HFSWR echoes datasets have demonstrated that this proposed method can increase the detection probability by about 20% than the state-of-art detection methods and classical target detection methods under various signal-clutter ratio (SCR) background.

Air Moving Target Indication in Nadir Region for Spaceborne Surveillance Radar Systems

For air moving target indication in nadir region, due to the fact that a spaceborne radar beam can illuminate the top of fuselage, the target radar cross section is usually high, which is beneficial for the detection of a low-observable target. However, due to the short slant range, specular reflection effect, and relatively low radar ground resolution, the power of clutter component from nadir region is comparatively high, leading to the insufficient clutter suppression and the degradation of target detection performance. Fortunately, when an air moving target is adequately high, the target echo is able to be separated from the main clutter echoes due to a shorter time delay, making it possible to be only mixed with low-power ambiguous clutter echoes. Based on these considerations, this paper analyzes the performance of air moving target indication in nadir region for a spaceborne surveillance radar system. It analyzes the target minimum detectable velocities with different target heights and beam center elevation angles. Also, an effective sample selection method based on adaptive range segmentation is proposed to solve the power heterogeneity issue between the main clutter area and the range ambiguous clutter area. As a conclusion, the larger the elevation angle of an air moving target is, the higher the minimum target detectable height is.

Using dictionary learning for clutter reduction in GPR B-scan images

ABSTRACT Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been widely used to detect subsurface objects. However, the target reflection experiences interference owing to clutter, such as direct coupling, interface reflection, and other undesired reflections. Reducing such clutter is a valuable processing step to improve detection accuracy. This letter proposes a GPR clutter reduction algorithm based on dictionary learning (DL). DL learns an adaptive dictionary that can sparsely represent the GPR B-scan image and enable clutter suppression. The learned dictionary atoms are divided into target atoms and clutter atoms, the target component and the clutter component can be reconstructed using these two types of dictionary atoms, respectively. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated using both simulation data and real GPR data. The results of the visual evaluation and quantitative analysis demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing clutter reduction algorithms.

A Novel SAR Imaging Method Based on Morphological Component Analysis

Clutter suppression plays an important role in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. The conventional SAR imaging methods are useful for distinguishing the echo signal and noise, but cannot separate the target signal from background clutter. Inspired by the signal separation ability of morphological component analysis (MCA), a novel SAR imaging method based on MCA is proposed to suppress the strong background clutter. In the new model, the SAR echo is considered as a linear superposition of target signal, clutter signal, and noise. According to different characteristics of morphological components, clutter dictionary and target dictionary are constructed to sparsely represent the clutter component and target component, respectively. Then, the MCA method based on the sparse representation and morphological diversity of signals is employed to decompose the SAR echo into the target signal, clutter signal, and noise. Finally, the separated target signal is processed to obtain the ultimate SAR image. Experimental results from simulated and real SAR data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Space-Time Adaptive Processing Clutter-Suppression Algorithm Based on Beam Reshaping for High-Frequency Surface Wave Radar

In high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) systems, clutter is a common phenomenon that causes objects to be submerged. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP), which uses two-dimensional data to increase the degrees of freedom, has recently become a crucial tool for clutter suppression in advanced HFSWR systems. However, in STAP, the pattern is distorted if a clutter component is contained in the main lobe, which leads to errors in estimating the target angle and Doppler frequency. To solve the main-lobe distortion problem, this study developed a clutter-suppression method based on beam reshaping (BR). In this method, clutter components were estimated and maximally suppressed in the side lobe while ensuring that the main lobe remained intact. The results of the proposed algorithm were evaluated by comparison with those of standard STAP and sparse-representation STAP (SR-STAP). Among the tested algorithms, the proposed BR algorithm had the best suppression performance and the most accurate main-lobe peak response, thereby preserving the target angle and Doppler frequency information. The BR algorithm can assist with target detection and tracking despite a background with ionospheric clutter.

A STAP clutter suppression algorithm based on sparse representation for small-array HFSWR

ABSTRACT In high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) systems, the main-lobe of the receiving angle spectrum suffers from severe broadening due to a small-array aperture effect. This broadening causes more clutter components to be mixed into the main-lobe, resulting in target vessels more prone to be submerged in the clutter. This problem severely affects the target detection performance. A reduction in the number of array elements decreases the degrees of freedom (DOF), making clutter suppression more difficult. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) has recently become a crucial tool for clutter suppression in advanced HFSWR systems, using two-dimensional data to increase DOF. Focusing on low DOF and typical nonhomogeneous clutter with high energy, this study proposes a STAP clutter suppression method by estimating clutter components accurately in the space-time domain based on sparse representation in few snapshots. The experimental results verify that the proposed algorithm provides high suppression performance for measured clutter.

Learning dynamic background for weakly supervised moving object detection

Moving Object Detection (MOD) aims at extracting foreground moving objects in videos from static cameras. While low-rank based approaches have achieved impressive success in the MOD task, their performance remains limited on dynamics background scenes. The main reason is that dynamic clutters, e.g., swaying leaves and rippers, are easy to mix up with moving objects in the decomposition model which simply classify the sparse noise as foregrounds. In order to improve the generalization ability of low-rank based moving object detectors, we suggest adding an explicit dynamic clutter component in the decomposition framework with realistic dynamic background modeling. Then the dynamic clutter can be learned through object-free video data due to their self-similarity across time and space. Thus, the moving objects can be naturally separated by a tensor-based decomposition model which formulates the static background by a unidirectional low-rank tensor, learns the dynamic clutter by a two-stream neural network, and constrains moving objects with spatiotemporal continuity. To further provide a more accurate object detection result, an objectness prior is embedded into our model in an attention manner. Extensive experimental results on the challenging datasets of dynamic background clearly demonstrate the superior performance of our model over the state-of-the-art in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality.

An IR-UWB Multi-Sensor Approach for Collision Avoidance in Indoor Environments

This article aims to propose new techniques to detect and distinguish humans from moving machines in indoor environments. Although many research efforts have been already dedicated to humans’ indoor detection, most of the work has been focused on counting people and crowd measurement for consumer business applications. Our objective is to develop a reliable approach for humans’ indoor detection and localization aiming at avoiding collisions inside a mixed Industry 4.0 manned and unmanned environment to enhance personal and equipment safety and to prevent unwanted intrusions. An original aspect of our research is that we have worked on the real-time estimation of humans’ and moving machines’ positions while addressing the problems of multipath components and noise clutter detection. A multipulse constant false alarm rate detection algorithm is also proposed for removing the misdetections due to heavy clutter components in the indoor environment. Four impulse radio ultrawideband transceivers are placed in a specific geometry and data fusion is performed to reduce the influence of multipath and noise on the detection process. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is then used to extract the patterns corresponding to a moving machine and humans and classify them accordingly. Experiments have been carried out in two different indoor environments to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms.

A weather signal detection algorithm based on EVD in elevation for airborne weather radar

Interest is growing in the application of the spatial location information from weather scenario to the monitoring of meteorological signal for airborne weather radar system. Here, a new algorithm utilizes the differences between ground clutter and meteorological signal in terms of the spatial location in elevation dimension to achieve weather signal detection (WSD). Specifically, weather signal submerged in ground clutter background is detected over a so-called diagram of the second eigenvalue to improve weather observation. Generally, this diagram is acquired by implementing eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) operation on raw data which is collected via dual-channel in elevation. For WSD, the second eigenvalue in the diagram is employed as the test statistic. And this study investigates the statistics of the second eigenvalue in the case that weather signal component, ground clutter component and Gaussian noise are all complex Gaussian distributed and they are statistically independent. Based on the statistics, a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) detector is also designed and then the second eigenvalue of the cell under test undergoes the CFAR detector to screen out the pixels containing meteorological signal component. Simulations, as well as experimental results, are presented to demonstrate the theoretical analysis and to evaluate the detection performance of the proposed EVD-based algorithm. As compared to most of the current WSD approaches, the presented EVD-based method really shows increased detection capability and great robustness.

Improving Signal Statistics Using a Regression Ground Clutter Filter. Part 1: Theory and Simulations

AbstractGround clutter filtering is an important and necessary step for quality control of ground-based weather radars. In this two-part paper ground clutter mitigation is addressed using a time-domain regression filter. Clutter filtering is now widely accomplished with spectral processing where the times series of data corresponding to a radar resolution volume are transformed with a Discrete Fourier Transform after which the zero and near-zero velocity clutter components are eliminated by setting them to zero. Subsequently for reectivity, velocity and spectrum width estimates, interpolation techniques are used to recover some of the power loss due to the clutter filter, which has been shown to reduce bias. The spectral technique requires that the I (in-phase) and Q (quadrature) time series be windowed in order to reduce clutter power leakage away from zero and near-zero velocities. Unfortunately, window functions such as the Hamming, Hann and Blackman attenuate the time series signal by 4.01, 4.19 and 5.23 dB for 64-point times series, respectively, and thereby effectively reduce the number of independent samples available for estimating the radar parameters of any underlying weather echo. Here in Part 1 a regression filtering technique is investigated, via simulated data, which does not require the use of such window functions and thus provides for better weather signal statistics. In Part 2 (Hubbert et al. 2021) the technique is demonstrated using both S-Pol and NEXRAD data. It is shown that the regression filter rejects clutter as effectively as the spectral technique but has the distinct advantage that estimates of the radar variables are greatly improved. The technique is straightforward and can be executed in real time.

Adaptive strategies for clutter edge detection in radar

In this paper, the problem of the detection and localization of clutter edges within training data is addressed. This is accomplished through a procedure capable of discriminating between either a unique homogeneous set or two heterogeneous subsets within a sliding window moving over the set of range bins of interest. The problem is first formulated as a binary hypothesis test assuming that the rank of the covariance clutter component is known and solved resorting to the generalized likelihood ratio test. Then, in the case of no a priori knowledge about the rank of the clutter covariance matrix, a preliminary estimation stage relying on the model order selection rules is devised. Interestingly, the estimates provided by the detection stage can be processed by a fusion algorithm in order to improve the quality of the location estimate of the clutter edge. Finally, the performance analysis conducted in comparison with a suitable competitor highlights the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

Joint Blind Deconvolution and Robust Principal Component Analysis for Blood Flow Estimation in Medical Ultrasound Imaging

This article addresses the problem of high-resolution Doppler blood flow estimation from an ultrafast sequence of ultrasound images. Formulating the separation of clutter and blood components as an inverse problem has been shown in the literature to be a good alternative to spatio-temporal singular value decomposition (SVD)-based clutter filtering. In particular, a deconvolution step has recently been embedded in such a problem to mitigate the influence of the point spread function (PSF) of the imaging system. Deconvolution was shown in this context to improve the accuracy of the blood flow reconstruction. However, the PSF needs to be measured experimentally, and measuring it requires nontrivial experimental setups. To overcome this limitation, we propose herein a blind deconvolution method able to estimate both the blood component and the PSF from Doppler data. Numerical experiments conducted on simulated and in vivo data demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison with the previous method based on experimentally measured PSF and two other state-of-the-art approaches.

Adaptive Complex Variational Mode Decomposition for Micro-Motion Signal Processing Applications.

In order to suppress the strong clutter component and separate the effective fretting component from narrow-band radar echo, a method based on complex variational mode decomposition (CVMD) is proposed in this paper. The CVMD is extended from variational mode decomposition (VMD), which is a recently introduced technique for adaptive signal decomposition, limited to only dealing with the real signal. Thus, the VMD is extended from the real domain to the complex domain firstly. Then, the optimal effective order of singular value is obtained by singular value decomposition (SVD) to solve the problem of under-decomposition or over-decomposition caused by unreasonable choice of decomposition layer, it is more accurate than detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Finally, the strongly correlated modes and weakly correlated modes are judged by calculating the Mahalanobis distance between the band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs) and the original signal, which is more robust than the correlation judgment methods such as computing cross-correlation, Euclidean distance, Bhattachryya distance and Hausdorff distance. After the weak correlation modes are eliminated, the signal is reconstructed locally, and the separation of the micro-motion signal is realized. The experimental results show that the proposed method can filter out the strong clutter component and the fuselage component from radar echo more effectively than the local mean decomposition (LMD), empirical mode decomposition and moving target indicator (MTI) filter.