Research On Clutter Suppression For Airborne Array Radar

The technique of Space Time Adaptive Processing(STAP) can improve the moving target detection performance of the airborne array radar evidently. But the high computation complexity of full rank STAP makes it extremely difficult in real-time processing, so the reduced-rank STAP algorithms which can realize the suboptimum processing are the key to engineering applications. Besides, the environment faced by airborne array radar is usually nonhomogeneous, which results in the lack of independent identically distributed training samples, and finally leads to the decline of traditional STAP algorithms’ performance. So it is necessary to research further on STAP algorithms which can be applied even in heterogeneous environments.On the basis of space-time signal model, the clutter characteristics such as space-time-coupling and nonhomogeneity in airborne array radar are analyzed, then the principles of optimum space-time processing and classical reduced-rank STAP algorithms are introduced. After that, solutions to power heterogeneity clutter and range dependence clutter are given. Based on slipping window processing in time domain, the detailed analysis of channel correlations as well as the principles of auxiliary channel selecting, a new method to suppress clutters was proposed which we called the Extended-F$A algorithm with minimum redundance of auxiliary channels. The new method can improve the performance of clutter suppression furthest by adding the least number of auxiliary doppler channels.