Joint time-frequency analysis of over-the-horizon radar data

This paper examines the application of joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA) to the detection of weak targets that are close to the powerful ocean clutter in signals received by over-the-horizon radar (OTHR). Issues of interest are the detection of targets near time-varying clutter and the use of JTFA to model the clutter for the purpose of excision. Comparisons are made between the spectrogram and the particular JTFA algorithm applied here, namely, the Smoothed Pseudo Wigner-Ville Distribution (SPWVD). Results are shown for real and synthetic signals. The SPWVD of the real signal has been successfully modeled by a synthetic signal, which increases our understanding of the behavior of this transform when applied to OTHR clutter data.