Taylor series expansions for airborne radar space-time adaptive processing

Sophie Beau (1) , Sylvie Marcos (1)

1 L2S - Laboratoire des signaux et systèmes

Space time adaptive processing (STAP) for range dependent clutter rejection in airborne radar is considered. Indeed, radar antenna architectures or configurations which are different from the conventional uniform linear antenna array (ULA) and side-looking configuration have consequences on the clutter properties. We here investigate the use of Taylor series expansions of the space-time covariance matrix in the classical sample matrix inversion (SMI) STAP method in order to mitigate the range non-stationarity of the clutter and we compare it to the Derivative Based Updating (DBU) already proposed in the literature. We also propose a new algorithm based on a Taylor series expansion of the interference plus noise subspace in conjunction with the eigencanceler-based (EC) STAP, which improves the performance in term of SINR loss, compared to the DBU method. In this paper, the particular cases of a ULA in a non side-looking configuration and a uniform circularly curved antenna (UCCA) array in side-looking and non side-looking configurations are considered for the test and the comparison of the presented algorithms.

Keywords: STAP; Taylor series; non stationary environments; Taylor series expansion; eigencanceler- based methods; Pulse Airborne radar; Radar clutter

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Signal and Image processing; Computer Science [cs]; Signal and Image Processing

Sophie Beau, Sylvie Marcos. Taylor series expansions for airborne radar space-time adaptive processing. IET Radar Sonar and Navigation, 2011, 5 (3), pp.266-278. ⟨10.1049/iet-rsn.2010.0103⟩. ⟨hal-00555356⟩