Generation of random sea clutter amplitude sequence with quantitative control on distribution tail

This letter proposes a data-driven method to simulate random sea clutter amplitude sequence with distribution and correlation characteristics directly inherited from the measured clutter. First, a generation model is developed to simulate clutter amplitude sequence with desired distribution. By multiplying the measured amplitudes with random disturbance coefficients, the model introduces sample diversity between the simulated and measured sequences. Meanwhile, to quantitatively control the difference of the distribution tails between the simulated and measured sequences (i.e. to ensure their distributions are similar), the threshold error metric is introduced to set the disturbance variance. Second, a scheme combining the generation model with the correlation transfer technique is presented, which allows to simulate clutter amplitude sequence with both desired distribution and correlation for engineering purpose. Experiments based on different measured clutter sets indicate the proposed method works very well.