Whitening Degree Evaluation Method to Test Estimate Accuracy of Speckle Covariance Matrix

Abstract

In the background of sea clutter, the accuracy of adaptive target detection is heavily influenced by the estimated performance of speckle covariance matrix. Generally, Normalized Frobenius Norm (NFN) is used to test the estimated accuracy of different speckle covariance matrix estimators, in which the requirement of a known real covariance matrix is hardly realized in the radar system. Therefore, in this study, a whitening degree evaluation method is proposed wherein the decorrelation of speckle covariance matrix in whitening filter processing of the radar system is fully exploited. It considers the correlation degree among pulses in the whitening clutter vector as the criterion to evaluate the estimate error of the speckle covariance matrix. The proposed method shows consistent conclusions with NFN on simulated data and also avoids limitations of the latter method in real data processing.