Study of Clutter Reduction Techniques in Wide Bandwidth HF/VHF Deep Ground Penetrating Radar

Reducing clutter is one of the most daunting problems a radar processing engineer faces. Clutter causes a significant problem when attempting to detect sub-surface targets, as any significant change in the ground dielectric will produce a return at the receiver. The difficulty in reducing the clutter is compounded by the fact that the spectral characteristics of the clutter are similar to that of the target. While there are many methods that exist to reduce clutter, few do not require a prior information of either the target or the clutter. There are applications, of interest to the electromagnetic community, that are restricted in the amount of a prior information available to them. Estimation-subtraction filters calculate an estimate of the clutter from the statistics of the data collected and subtract that estimate from the original data. The Wiener filter has long been used as a way to suppress noise signals when a target reference is known. Using it to reduce clutter is a relatively new area of research. This research proposes estimation-subtraction filters and an application of the Wiener filter, which do not require a priori information to reduce the clutter of a bi-static synthetic aperture based, wideband deep ground penetrating radar system. The results of applying these filters to data collected in this way, at these depths, are illustrated here for the first time.Air Force Inst of Tech Wright-Patterson AFB OH is the author of 'Study of Clutter Reduction Techniques in Wide Bandwidth HF/VHF Deep Ground Penetrating Radar', published 2002 under ISBN 9781423507628 and ISBN 1423507622.