Clutter Suppression and High-Resolution Imaging of Noncooperative Ground Targets for Bistatic Airborne Radar

In a recent paper, the problem of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging moving ground targets was discussed and an effective solution based on a novel joint space-time adaptive processing (STAP)-ISAR formulation was proposed. In the case of bistatic geometry, ISAR imaging can be simply and effectively enabled via the bistatically equivalent monostatic theory, which allows for monostatic ISAR processing to be used to form bistatic ISAR images. However, the clutter nonstationary introduced by the bistatic geometry strongly degraded STAP performances if a monostatic STAP processing is used. In this paper, a new joint STAP-ISAR processing is introduced that works in the bistatic case. Theoretical figures and numerical simulations are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.