Radar clutter suppression using adaptive algorithms

Radar clutter is the extraneous return waveform from the radar background environment. Because the clutter has a large cross-section, radar clutter can seriously degrade target detection. Conventional radar systems assume the clutter is stationary with its energy concentrated at low frequencies. Thus, a fixed high pass filter (HPF) is used to filter out the clutter. This approach has two major problems: (1) it degrades detection of a slow moving target, and (2) it cannot filter out the high frequency clutter. To overcome the difficulties of conventional radar clutter suppression algorithms, This work proposed two adaptive clutter suppression schemes to enhance the target detection probability. Computer simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed clutter suppression algorithms.