Statistical modeling of rough surface scattering for ground-penetrating radar applications

Rough surface clutter is a significant source of interference in non-specular ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications that needs to be suppressed to maintain high performance in the signal processing. Our research is in the directions of (1) development and testing of flexible parametric models for the statistical distribution of clutter that rely on the theories of alpha-stable random processes, (2) establishment of bounds on the performance of signal processing algorithms, and (3) design and analysis of robust, non-Gaussian signal processing algorithms based on the statistical clutter models. Synthetic data simulated with FDTD techniques are extensively used.