Adaptive clutter cancellation in bistatic radar

Abstract

The detection performance of airborne bistatic radar depends on suitable clutter mitigation techniques. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is a candidate for suppressing bistatic clutter. Since STAP implementation relies on secondary data for covariance estimation, the nonstationary nature of typical bistatic angle-Doppler contours over range is a point of concern. In this paper we find that bistatic STAP suffers greater performance degradation than commonly observed in monostatic STAP analyses. Additionally we briefly examine approaches to enhance bistatic STAP capability.