A clutter reduction algorithm based on clustering for active sonar systems

In this paper, we propose a new clutter reduction algorithm, which rejects heavy clutter density in shallow water environments, based on a clustering method. At first, it applies the density-based clustering to active sonar measurements by considering speed of targets, pulse repetition intervals, etc. We assume clustered measurements as target candidates and remove noise, which is a set of unclustered measurements. After clustering, we classify target and clutter measurements by the validation check method. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on synthetic data and sea-trial data. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides significantly better performances to reduce clutter than the conventional algorithm.y