Clutter and Interference Cancellation in River Surface Velocity Measurement with a Coherent S-Band Radar

Abstract

Using a Doppler radar to measure river surface velocity is a safe and effective technique. However, the measurement would be severely affected by undesired targets that enter the illuminated area of radar. The issue is worsened when measuring the surface velocities of wide rivers because undesired targets such as boats and ships are more likely to be present. The buoy boats fixed on the river surface and cargo ships sailing on the river would generate ground clutter and moving target interference, respectively. The clutter and interference can mask the signal produced by the Bragg scattering and seriously bias the extraction result of river surface velocity. This paper proposes two effective methods to remove ground clutter and moving target interference, respectively. One is an improved phase-based method that eliminates ground clutter after obtaining its boundaries through the phase in the frequency domain, and another is an improved constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector that combines smallest-of selection logic and a multi-step deletion scheme to detect and remove interference in the time-Doppler spectrum. The experimental data measuring the surface velocity of the Yangtze River with a coherent S-band radar in July 2022 are used to verify the proposed methods. The results show that the proposed methods can effectively remove ground clutter and moving target interference, respectively. After clutter and interference cancellation, a more reasonable result of river surface velocity distribution can be extracted. Therefore, the methods proposed in this paper can be used to remove clutter and interference when extracting the surface velocity of rivers with numerous undesired targets.