OP-RBC-based STAP Method for Clutter Suppression in Bistatic End-fire Array Airborne Radar

This paper addresses the problem of range-dependent clutter suppression using end-fire arrays in the bistatic airborne radar based on a novel space-time adaptive processing (STAP) approach. At the modeling stage, the range-dependent clutter model is formulated and analyzed. Furthermore, considering that the clutter in the far field is range-independent in the bistatic end-fire array airborne radar, the space-time steering vector is constructed by using the spatial and Doppler frequency information of the clutter to obtain the spatial and temporal orthogonal projection matrices. Furthermore, the clutter in the near field is eliminated by performing the orthogonal projection (OP) algorithm with the constructed projection matrices. Therefore, the range ambiguous clutter is suppressed and the covariance matrix of the range-independent clutter is constructed. Diagonal loading (DL) is also performed to eliminate the aperture loss. Subsequently, the clutter covariance matrices corresponding to each range cell are compensated via the registration based compensation (RBC) method by using the covariance matrix of the range-independent clutter as the reference. Finally, the range-dependent clutter can be effectively suppressed via the OP-RBC-based STAP method. Simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed method in clutter suppression.