Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2021, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (10): 2742-2755.doi: 10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2021.10.06

• New progress in electromagnetic scattering and inverse scattering • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Statistical modeling and characteristic analysis of polarimetric SAR sea clutter at X-band based on numerical simulations

Yanlei DU1,2, Fan GAO2, Tao LIU3, Jian YANG2,*   

  1. 1. Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
    2. Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
    3. School of Electronic Engineering, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan 430033, China
  • Received:2021-08-03 Online:2021-10-01 Published:2021-11-04
  • Contact: Jian YANG

Abstract:

This paper focuses on the numerical simulation and statistical modeling of X-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sea clutter under level 3~5 sea states. Firstly, by using Apel spectrum and Monte Carlo method, we generate large-scale two-dimensional rough ocean surfaces at various wind speeds. Then, the high-frequency electromagnetic scattering methods are employed simulate polarimetric SAR sea clutter. In particular, the physical optics method and the shooting and bouncing ray method are used to separately consider the single scattering and multiple scattering on sea surfaces. The accuracy and statistical distribution of simulated sea clutter are validated using X-band geophysical mode function and the shore-based measurement. Finally, based on the simulated sea clutter data, the statistical modeling and characteristic analyses of sea clutter are conducted using typical product models and Mellin-kind statistics. The simulation results indicate that, at the high resolution of 2 m×2 m, the X-band co-pol sea clutter does not obey the classic K distribution which performs well for low-to-moderate resolution sea clutter, and presents different texture properties at various wind speeds and wind directions. X-band cross-pol sea clutter shows weak texture characteristics and basically obeys the Wishart distribution. With the increase of incident angle and radar look number, the texture characteristics of sea clutter gradually weaken.

Key words: sea clutter, polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR), electromagnetic scattering simulations, Mellin-kind statistics

CLC Number: 

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