Clutter Removal in Sub-Nyquist Radar

Abstract

Recently, a new approach to sub-Nyquist sampling and processing in pulse-Doppler radar was introduced, based on the Xampling approach to reduced-rate sampling combined with Doppler focusing performed on the low-rate samples. This method imposes no restrictions on the transmitter, reduces both the sam- pling and processing rates and exhibits linear signal-to-noise ratio improvement with the number of pulses. Here we extend previous work on sub-Nyquist pulse-Doppler radar by incorporating a clutter removal algorithm operating on the sub-Nyquist samples, allowing to reject clutter modeled as a colored Gaussian random process. In particular, we show how to adapt standard clutter rejection techniques to work directly on the sub-Nyquist samples, allowing to preserve high detection rates even in the presence of strong clutter, while avoiding the need to first interpolate the samples to the Nyquist grid.