Parameter Estimation for Sea Clutter Pareto Distribution Model Based on Variable Interval

Abstract

The generalized Pareto (GP) distribution model is often used to describe the amplitude statistical feature of sea clutter. Generally, the parameters of GP distribution are estimated by moments estimators. However, when the sea state is high, the appearance of sea spikes will increase the echo of the anomalous scattering units, which leads to a decrease in the parameter estimation accuracy and target detection performance. To improve the parameter estimation accuracy, this paper proposes a novel parameter estimation method based on variable intervals. Considering the local properties of sea clutter, we take a variable interval of the entire sea clutter series for parameter estimation, where the interval position is selected according to the sea state conditions. For contrast, the bipercentile parameter estimation and truncate moment estimation are also introduced. Finally, the experiment based on the real measured X-band sea clutter datasets indicates that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art moments estimators.