Adaptive Sea Clutter Suppression for Marine Radar Systems to Enhance Uncrewed Surface Vehicle Autonomy

Marine radar is crucial for detecting objects near ships and ensuring safe navigation, and the performance of marine radar relies heavily on gain-tuning. However, the radar sensor lacks sufficient feature information to effectively distinguish desired objects from radar noise or clutter. Selecting an appropriate radar parameter based on environmental conditions is therefore crucial for generating a clutter-minimized radar image for navigation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive decision-making method to select an appropriate sensor parameter value. Through numerous field tests, we determined that the gain value requires frequent adjustment for uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) operation in real-sea environments. To streamline the process of finding the parameter for improved detection performance, we then present an automatic decision-making methodology that determines the appropriate sea clutter adjustment parameter based on the surrounding environmental conditions. We conclude by sharing field test results using this adaptive parameter estimation approach.