Morphological Operator and Empirical Mode Decomposition for Clutter Mitigation

Maritime surveillance of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is a present military and civilian challenge. The High Frequency Surface Wave Radar, as its coverage range is not limited by the radio horizon, is well-suited to fulfil this task. Effect of ionospheric clutter can, however, strongly limits target detection. Ionospheric clutter results from disturbance in ionization. In previous works we proposed using wavelets to remove the clutter. We are now considering another multi-scale analysis. Indeed, we wondered if an evolving basis could overcome the issue. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) might offer such a possibility. The initial idea is still using multiscale analysis to turn to good account the differences in variation scales of targets and ionospheric clutter. Apart from the fact that basis functions is self-determined by the EMD. We have also tried to associate morphological operators and EMD. We are presenting here the first results of our investigations.