Abstract:

The characteristics of clutter nonhomogeneity are analyzed for airborne bistatic radar, and a novel clutter suppression method, i.e. the estimation of the inverse covariance matrix (EICM), is proposed based on the characteristics of clutter inverse covariance matrixes. The clutter covariance matrix of neighboring ranges is gained by using conventional methods firstly， then the inverse covariance matrix of the test range gate is estimated based on the inverse covariance matrix of neighboring ranges. Finally, clutter suppression is completed effectively via the conventional spacetime adaptive processing method. The simulation results show that performance of clutter suppression for airborne bistatic radar can be improved greatly using the proposed method.