A versatile bistatic & polarimetric marine radar simulator

We present a versatile simulator for marine radars that can, in particular, be used in multistatic configurations. Today, most simulators modelize the sea clutter by a random noise; however, no obvious relation exists between physical parameters (e.g. wind speed or salinity) and the shape of the probabilistic law of noise. On the contrary, we modelize the whole acquisition chain: antennas and their polarization, the shape of the emitted signal, etc. Realistic sea surfaces are generated using the two-scales model on a semi-deterministic basis, so as to be able to incorporate the presence of ship wakes. We present pseudo-raw signals obtained with our simulator. These signals can be further processed and fed to a ship detection and tracking chain. We aim at using this simulation as a tool to benchmark these algorithms and improve them by adding knowledge on the physical uncertainties and the sensor imprecisions.