Effects of sea clutter on ISAR imaging

Sea clutter exists in the realistic echo during the ship imaging with the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), this paper presents a method to analyze sea clutter effects on ISAR imaging with different parameters. Based on the spherically invariant random process (SIRP) method, two dimensional sea clutter temporally and spatially correlated coherent is simulated and combined with the synthetic target echo to generate realistic echo. Effects of sea clutter with different shape parameters on ISAR image focus are analyzed by using image entropy and correlation coefficient, effects of the Doppler frequency parameter of the sea clutter on the Doppler spectrum of ISAR are analyzed by using the Doppler spread techniques, and effects of the sea clutter with different signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) on ISAR motion compensation algorithms are also analyzed by using cross correlation technique. Simulation results validate the analytic techniques.