Data Science: Clutter

NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) is investigating the use of AI to automatically identify and classify clutter obstructed radio frequency propagation paths. Clutter is vegetation, buildings, and other structures that cause radio signal loss through dispersion, reflection, and diffraction. It does not include terrain effects. The classifier is a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained using lidar data coinciding with radio frequency propagation measurements made by ITS. This trained CNN can be fed new radio path lidar data and a clutter classification label is predicted.