Polarisation‐space‐time adaptive processing for heterogeneous clutter suppression of airborne‐phased array radar

Abstract

Conventional space-time adaptive processing (STAP) achieves clutter suppression by combining spatial signals and the temporal pulses. However, extreme slow-moving target cannot be effectively detected by space-time joint filtering in ambiguous and non-broadside clutter environment for airborne-phased array radar. By increasing the polarisation information in clutter suppression, improved moving target detection performance can be obtained by the polarisation-space-time adaptive processing (P-STAP). In this study, the performance of P-STAP for airborne-phased array radar is analysed. The polarised signal model of airborne-phased array radar is firstly established and then clutter suppression principle of P-STAP is derived in detailed. Afterwards, the performance of P-STAP is investigated and compared with conventional STAP in ambiguous clutter environment. It is verified that the P-STAP can outperform the conventional STAP for slow moving target detection by three-domain joint processing, especially for ambiguous and non-broadside clutter environment for airborne-phased array radar.