Adaptive clutter suppression for low PRF heliborne reconnaissance radar

Adaptive spatial-temporal processing techniques have been widely applied to suppressing clutter and interference in airborne radar. However, it is pointed out that the clutter received by low PRF heliborne radar has many traits different from that received by AEW radar. A new approach called the adaptive beamformer-DPCA cascade processing is proposed, and the detection performance is compared with the current approaches. It is shown that the new approach can suboptimally suppress clutter and interference, improve the detection ability of slowly moving targets, and also provide compensation for multi-dimensional platform drift, while saving considerable computations compared with optimal filtering.