Abstract:

The short-range clutter presents severe range dependence for non-side looking airborne radar (non-SLAR). Due to the absence of elevation degree of freedom, the uniform linear array cannot directly suppress the short-range clutter with range ambiguity. As a result, the clutter plus noise covariance matrix cannot be estimated accurately which greatly declines the clutter suppression performance by space-time adaptive processing (STAP). To overcome this problem, a short-range clutter elimination method is proposed. Firstly， the elevation angle of the short range is evaluated. Then the short-range clutter is reconstructed by the information of the clutter spectrum, and the short-range clutter to all received channels by adaptive processing is eliminated. Finally, reduced demensional space-time adaptive processing (RD-STAP) technique is adopted to suppress the residual clutter. The proposed method can eliminate the short-range clutter effectively. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the method.