A Robust Heterogeneous Clutter Suppression Method for Airborne Planar Array Radar

Due to lack of enough Independent Identically Distributed (IID) training samples, it seriously degrades the clutter suppression performance of the traditional Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) algorithms in heterogeneous clutter and target rich environment. To solve the problem, a heterogeneous clutter suppression method for the airborne plane array radar is proposed, which is robust to the array error. Firstly, the clutter representation basis matrix is constructed by the radar system parameters priori knowledge. Next, with the consideration of array error, it estimates iteratively the clutter representation coefficient and array error by the least square criterion. Finally, the clutter cancellation is conducted by the obtained optimal clutter representation coefficient and array error in element-pulse domain. The proposed method does not need to estimate the statistical properties of cell under test and has no aperture loss. In addition, it does not need any training sample and can suppress effectively the heterogeneous clutter of airborne planar array radar echo data in rich target environment even if range ambiguity exists. Simulation results verify the validity of the proposed method.