A Novel Data-Driven Modeling Method for the Spatial–Temporal Correlated Complex Sea Clutter

The sea clutter, referred to as the time-varying radar backscatter from the ocean surface, plays a significant role in marine radar development. The ocean’s complex hydrodynamics cause it to exhibit non-Gaussian and nonstationary characteristics, which brings challenges in the sea clutter modeling, especially for establishing its spatial–temporal correlated and coherent model. In this article, a data-driven method based on the Koopman mode decomposition (KMD) is proposed for modeling spatial–temporal correlated complex sea clutter. The method decomposes the coherent sea clutter dynamic behavior in terms of Koopman modes and corresponding temporal patterns. Then, these spatiotemporal patterns are used to construct the sea clutter state over time according to the approximate solution. Furthermore, this proposed state-of-the-art data-driven approach is benchmarked by the measured sea clutter data from intelligent PIXel processing radar (IPIX). It is demonstrated that the proposed approach accurately models the complex sea clutter with actual statistic characteristics, phase information, and spatial–temporal correlations. The mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) between the obtained and actual sea clutter are only 0.1817 and 0.2349, respectively. This work offers a practical approach for modeling sea clutter, especially when the spatial–temporal correlation and coherence information is needed.