MODELING SPATIALLY CORRELATED K-DISTRIBUTED CLUTTER

K-distributed clutter is represented as the product of a Rayleigh speckle component and the square root of a gamma distributed modulation process. A model describing the modulation process of arbitrary spatial autocorrelation function is presented. The key advantages of this model over previous models are that the spatial correlation is introduced to Gaussian processes, thus enabling well established linear filtering techniques to be used, the resulting clutter process is strictly K-distributed, and it leads to usable expressions for the multivariate description of the modulation and clutter processes.