Multi-Headed Deep Learning-Based Estimator for Correlated-SIRV ParetoType II Distributed Clutter

Abstract This paper deals with the problem of estimating the parameters of heavy-tailed sea-clutter in high-resolution radar, when the clutter is modelled by the correlated Pareto type II distribution. Existing estimators based on the maximum likelihood (ML) approach, integer-order moments (IOM) approach, fractional-order moments (FOM), and log-moments (log-MoM) have shown to be sensitive to changes in data correlation. In this work, we resort to a deep learning (DL) approach based on a multi-headed architecture to overcome this problem. Off-line training of the artificial neural networks (ANN) is carried out by using several combinations of the clutter parameters, with different correlation degrees. To assess the performance of the proposed estimator, we resort to Monte Carlo simulation and we observed that it has superior performance over existing approaches in terms of estimation mean square error (MSE) and robustness to changes of the clutter correlation coefficient.