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.
What is considered to be clutter by one user may be a target for another. Usually targets may be considered to be a point scatterer and clutter as extended, covering many rang...
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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.
What is considered to be clutter by one user may be a target for another. Usually targets may be considered to be a point scatterer and clutter as extended, covering many range, angle and Doppler cells. The clutter may fill a volume (rain) or be confined to a surface (land). In principle all that is required to estimate the return (backscatter) is a knowledge of the volume or surface illuminated and the echo per unit volume, η, or per unit surface area, σ°, (the backscatter coefficient).
In addition to any possible clutter there will also always be noise. The total signal competing with the target return is thus clutter plus noise. In practice there is often either no clutter or clutter dominates and the noise can...
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