Improvement of surface penetrating radar imaging by suppressing clutter using nonlinear gain control

Surface penetrating imaging technology reconstructs target images that conform to visual perception by interpreting radar data, which reflects the target's geometry and electromagnetic scattering characteristics directly. For surface penetration imaging, various sources of clutter cause failure of image interpretation, therefore clutter suppression is the key to obtain target information accurately. Though clutter suppression approaches aiming at the strong clutter make the target image prominent enough for imaging process, the weak clutter with energy close to the target affects the imaging quality. In this paper, a nonlinear gain control method is proposed for the suppression of weak clutter and improving the contrast of the imaging by non-linearly weakening the data below the threshold and enhancing the data above the threshold. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively improve the imaging quality.