Statistical analysis of high resolution land clutter

Results are described from land clutter analysis obtained from the fixed site BYSON radar at Malvern. Digital terrain elevation data is used to determine the imaged regions and the normalized log estimator, U, is measured to investigate the stability of the high resolution heavy-tailed clutter distribution. A numerical Laplace inversion scheme is described that can determine the distribution of an arbitrary sum of K-distributed variates within noise. However, without a priori knowledge of the clutter distribution, long-tailed distributions can only be accepted after rejecting the hypothesis of exponential clutter that may contain edges. A likelihood based discrimination test is proposed which can operate simultaneously at the same spatial level as a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) window. Results suggest that the majority of the scene is in fact closer to edge-corrupted speckle and many 'spiky' areas are related to man-made structures.