A complete framework of predicting the attributes of sea clutter under different operational conditions, specified by wind speed, wind direction, grazing angle, and polarization, is proposed for the first time. This framework is composed of empirical spectra to characterize sea-surface profiles under different wind speeds, the Monte Carlo method to generate realizations of sea-surface profiles, the physical-optics method to compute the normalized radar cross-sections (NRCSs) from individual sea-surface realizations, and regression of NRCS data (sea clutter) with an empirical probability density function (PDF) characterized by a few statistical parameters. JONSWAP and Hwang ocean-wave spectra are adopted to generate realizations of sea-surface profiles at low and high wind speeds, respectively. The probability density functions of NRCSs are regressed with K and Weibull distributions, each characterized by two parameters. The probability density functions in the outlier regions of weak and strong signals are regressed with a power-law distribution, each characterized by an index. The statistical parameters and power-law indices of the K and Weibull distributions are derived for the first time under different operational conditions. The study reveals succinct information of sea clutter that can be used to improve the radar performance in a wide variety of complicated ocean environments. The proposed framework can be used as a reference or guidelines for designing future measurement tasks to enhance the existing empirical models on ocean-wave spectra, normalized radar cross-sections, and so on.

In recent years, super-resolution imaging techniques have been intensely introduced to enhance the azimuth resolution of real aperture scanning radar (RASR). However, there is a paucity of research on the subject of sea surface imaging with small incident angles for complex scenarios. This research endeavors to explore super-resolution imaging for sea surface monitoring, with a specific emphasis on grounded or shipborne platforms. To tackle the inescapable interference of sea clutter, it was segregated from the imaging objects and was modeled alongside I/Q channel noise within the maximum likelihood framework, thus mitigating clutter\'s impact. Simultaneously, for characterizing the non-stationary regions of the monitoring scene, we harnessed the Markov random field (MRF) model for its two-dimensional (2D) spatial representational capacity, augmented by a quadratic term to bolster outlier resilience. Subsequently, the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion was employed to unite the ML function with the statistical model regarding imaging scene. This hybrid model forms the core of our super-resolution methodology. Finally, a fast iterative threshold shrinkage method was applied to solve this objective function, yielding stable estimates of the monitored scene. Through the validation of simulation and real data experiments, the superiority of the proposed approach in recovering the monitoring scenes and clutter suppression has been verified.

Along with the rapid development of marine radar, and particularly those carried on aircraft, the detection of small-sized targets which pose an increasing threat has become one of the main areas of interest. However, by considering an observation chain from an aircraft (such as a drone) in a maritime environment, with the aim of detecting and tracking of low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) targets, one of the important points would be the analysis of the radar system performance according to the radar input parameters, the atmospheric propagation medium, the various sea clutter characterization, and the type of targets (RCS, speed, etc.) in this environment. Therefore, it is necessary to obtain the overall path loss including the anomalous atmospheric environment, gas attenuation, clouds attenuation, rainfall attenuation, and beam scanning loss. To consider atmospheric attenuations, ITU-R models are used. On another side, because of spikes and dynamic variation properties, sea clutter is generally described by the statistical distribution with long tail and by its wider Doppler spectrum. Conventional algorithms such as those based on statistical models, MTI, and MTD processing are often limited, especially for the target of low speed and low RCS. Therefore, sea clutter, including empirical and statistical models available, is considered to estimate and simulate the impact of radar input parameters, targets RCS, and sea state on detection performance. The Doppler frequency of target echo which can be exploited for coherent processing is described by assuming an adequate scenario of observation geometry.

Adaptive waveform design for cognitive radar in the case of extended target detection under compound-Gaussian (CG) sea clutter is addressed. Based on the CG characteristics of sea clutter, the texture component is employed to characterize the clutter ensemble during each closed-loop feedback and its estimation can be used for the next transmitted waveform design. The resulting waveform design problem is formulated according to the following optimization criterion: maximization of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for sea clutter suppression, and imposing a further constraint on sidelobes level of the waveform autocorrelation outputs for decreasing the false alarm rate. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Maritime moving target detection and tracking through particle filter based track-before-detect (PF-TBD) has significant practical value for airborne forward-looking scanning radar. However, villainous weather and surging of ocean waves make it extremely difficult to accurately obtain a statistical model for sea clutter. As the likelihood ratio calculation in PF-TBD is dependent on the distribution of the clutter, the performance of traditional distribution-based PF-TBD seriously declines. To resolve these difficulties, this paper proposes a new target detection and tracking method, named spectral-residual-binary-entropy-based PF-TBD (SRBE-PF-TBD), which is independent from the prior knowledge of sea clutter. In the proposed method, the likelihood ratio calculation is implemented by first extracting the spectral residual of the input image to obtain the saliency map, and then constructing likelihood ratio through a binarization processing and information entropy calculation. Simulation results show that the proposed method had superior performance of maritime moving target detection and tracking.