Independent component analysis for underwater lidar clutter rejection
David W. Illig, William D. Jemison, Linda J. Mullen · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2016
This work demonstrates a new statistical approach towards backscatter “clutter” rejection for continuous-wave underwater lidar systems: independent component analysis. Independent component analysis is a statistical signal processing technique which can separate a return of interest from clutter in a statistical domain. After highlighting the statistical processing concepts, we demonstrate that underwater lidar target and backscatter returns have very different distributions, facilitating their separation in a statistical domain. Example profiles are provided showing the results of this separation, and ranging experiment results are presented. In the ranging experiment, performance is compared to a more conventional frequency-domain filtering approach. Target tracking is maintained to 14.5 attenuation lengths in the laboratory test tank environment, a 2.5 attenuation length improvement over the baseline.