Short-Range Clutter Suppression for Non-Side Looking Airborne Radar by Elevation Constraint Adaptive Processing

Abstract

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) can obtain excellent clutter suppression performance based on the accurate estimate of clutter plus noise covariance matrix which is obtained by enough identical independent distributed samples. However, the short-range clutter of non-side looking airborne radar (non-SLAR) occurs range dependence. As a result, the clutter plus noise covariance matrix can not be estimated accurately and thus the clutter suppressing performance by STAP declines greatly. In this paper, an elevation constraint adaptive processing method is proposed. This method obtains the elevation target steering vector by the eigen-decomposition of the elevation covariance matrix on the ambiguous pure far-range clutter, it is used to suppress short-range clutter and the residual range-independent clutter can be suppressed by two-dimensional azimuth-Doppler STAP methods. Simulation results show validity of the proposed method.