Land Clutter Statistics from an Airborne Passive Bistatic Radar

Passive operation is an important operational concept for future airborne radar platforms. Successful target detection requires an understanding of the underlying clutter statistics in order to set the detection threshold accurately. In addition, clutter statistics are important for modeling of passive radar performance and simulation of passive bistatic radar to aid in the development of new target detection algorithms. In this article, the clutter statistics of data from an airborne platform are studied over a range of bistatic geometries and receive polarizations. The illuminator is a digital video broadcast-terrestrial (DVB-T) station and the collected data spans both ground and maritime regions. The key contributions include a study of amplitude statistics using a number of common distributions and understanding the impact of the reference signal quality in terms of the clutter statistics.