Range‐dependent clutter suppression approach for non‐side‐looking airborne radar based on orthogonal waveforms

• DOI: 10.1049/iet-rsn.2014.0018
• Publication Date: 2014-09-09T15:33:24Z
• Authors: Cai Wen; Tong Wang; Jian‐xin Wu
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Clutter suppression is a challenging problem in non‐side‐looking airborne radar (NSLAR) because of the range‐dependent clutter. It is more intractable when the NSLAR operates at high pulse repetition frequency (HPRF). In this study, a cascaded algorithm is presented to realise clutter suppression for NSLAR with HPRF. A novel orthogonal‐waveform‐based elevation adaptive beamforming method is proposed to suppress range‐dependent near‐range clutter at the first stage, and the residual range‐independent far‐range clutter is suppressed by azimuth‐Doppler space‐time adaptive processing (STAP) at the second stage. The proposed elevation beamformer can provide excellent performance on near‐range clutter suppression because of the developed secondary data selection strategy. After suppression of the range‐dependent near‐range clutter, the range independency of clutter samples is enhanced evidently. Hence, the clutter suppression performance obtained by azimuth‐Doppler STAP methods could be improved dramatically. Numerical examples are given to verify the validity of the proposed algorithm.