Declutter plugin

radR's basic target finding algorithm is poor at removing persistent but fluctuating clutter.

With recorded data (blipmovies), you can now ask radR to learn the location of such clutter using a simple occupancy threshold: any sample slot which forms part of a blip sufficiently often is probably clutter, and a blip covering enough such clutter sample slots is probably itself clutter.

Only for versions of radR before Sept. 6, 2011:

• create a subfolder in the radR plugins folder called "declutter"
• download the files declutter.plugin.R, declutter.conf.update.R, and declutter.desc.R from here, and save them in the declutter folder
• restart radR, and load the "declutter" plugin

The plugin works in two passes:

1. learn the pattern of clutter.  Do this by selecting "learning" from the declutter plugin menu, and hit play to process a few hundred or more scans from your blipmovie.
2. use the learned pattern of clutter to filter out likely bogus blips.  Select "filtering" from the declutter plugin menu, then process the blipmovie as you would have normally.  The declutter plugin's filtering is in addition to any other active filtering.

Notes:

• you can plot the pattern of learned clutter by choosing that entry from the declutter plugin menu.  This works by painting the sample occupancy rate into the cold portion of the plot window, using the other palette and gamma values.  Enabling this feature slows down radR, especially in the plugin's learning phase.
• the pointerinfo window displays the occupancy rate for the sample under the cursor, and the mean occupancy rate for the patch/blip under the cursor.
• the learned clutter pattern can be saved to a file and reloaded for use with other blipmovies from the same site.
• saved clutter files can only be used with data of the same size (pulses x samples) as the original data from which the clutter were learned. 
• although radR doesn't check this, you should only use learned clutter files with data having the same range per sample (i.e. RSS$scan.info$sample.dist)
• the declutter plugin is not intended to filter rain, and you should not try to learn patterns of persistent fluctuating clutter from rainy scans, as these will likely reduce its effectiveness
• the declutter plugin only works when "filter blips" is enabled in the blip processing menu.  If you want only the declutter filtering, set liberal min and max blip parameter values in the blip processing menu (e.g. -1 for max means no maximum)