Intelligent Suppression Method for Ionospheric Clutter Based on Clustering and Greedy Strategy

Abstract

Clutter is a term used for unwanted echoes in electronic systems, particularly in reference to radars. Such echoes are typically returned from ground, sea, rain, animals/insects, chaff, and atmospheric turbulences, and can cause serious performance issues with radar systems. Ionospheric clutter is a time-varying, nonstationary, and non-Gaussian complex clutter in High-Frequency Surface-Wave Radar (HFSWR) system and its suppression is a daunting task. Extensive research on intelligent classification systems and suppression techniques of ionospheric clutter was conducted to solve the universal problem of single clutter suppression algorithm. After a complete analysis of the characteristics of ionospheric clutter, the present work proposes an intelligent ionospheric clutter processing method based on clustering and greedy algorithms for the classification and suppression of ionospheric clutter. Experimental results showed that the proposed method has a better performance than the traditional algorithm in suppressing ionospheric clutter.

Keywords

• intelligent clutter processing
• high-frequency surface-wave radar (hfswr)
• clutter cluster
• clutter suppression
• ionospheric clutter