A Novel Two-Dimensional Sparse-Weight NLMS Filtering Scheme for Passive Bistatic Radar

Abstract

In passive bistatic radars, weak target echoes may often be masked by direct path interference, multipath components, and strong target echoes, making weak target detection a challenging problem. The conventional 1-D adaptive cancelation algorithms, such as the normalized least mean square (NLMS), cannot effectively suppress strong target echoes when their Doppler frequencies spread. In addition, the continuous distribution of the NLMS weight vector does not match the sparse characteristics of strong multipath components and target echoes, thus resulting in degraded cancelation performance. Motivated by this fact, a novel 2-D sparse-weight NLMS filtering scheme is proposed by extending the NLMS to a 2-D structure, in which the weight vector is sparsely distributed and adaptively adjusted based on the sparse strong multipath components and target echoes.