Adaptive sensing of dynamic target state in heavy sea clutter

We propose an adaptive estimation method for the spatio-temporal covariance matrix of sea clutter. The motivation is to enable adaptive detection approaches that rely on accurate estimation of this matrix. The method involves vectorization of the equations for the dynamical system model governing the temporal evolution of the clutter matrix followed by a multiple particle filtering approach to deal with the high dimensionality of the formulation. The estimated sea clutter covariance matrix is applied to the problem of detection of a small target in heavy clutter; effectiveness is demonstrated via simulations.