GMTI STAP performance under space‐time impaired clutter environment

Abstract

Ground moving target indicator (GMTI) RADAR system frequently incorporates space-time adaptive processing for successful moving targets discrimination in a highly cluttered environment. The minimum detectable velocity (MDV) of the target gets affected due to the added clutter impairments such as foliage penetration and angle independent channel mismatch. A novel clutter model is postulated in this work that includes assessment enacted in view of both angle and Doppler clutter impairments at a time instead of their individual analysis as in the reported literature. The performance of the GMTI RADAR in terms of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio loss is evaluated using the extrusive beamforming methods namely sample matrix inversion and principal component canceller. In high decorrelated clutter environment, the later outperforms in terms of the MDV, making use of a lesser number of training snapshots. The approach is validated with mathematical modelling and numerical simulations.