A MMSE filter for range sidelobe reduction

In many cases, one needs to estimate a target that is obscured by the sidelobes of a very large, adjacent scatterer. For example, the Earth's surface can ruin near-surface rain-rate measurements obtained from an airborne platform, or it can prevent a ground-penetrating radar from detecting land mines located at shallow depth. In these cases, the range sidelobes of the ground are larger than the targets near the surface. The range sidelobes cannot be optimally controlled because target information is not used. However, in most situations the location and magnitude of such a large scatterer can be predicted. In this paper, a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimator is proposed to improve the range sidelobe problem. The MMSE estimator uses information about the scenario to find the optimum processing filter. Simulated results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of this process