An advanced STAP implementation for surveillance radar systems

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) has emerged as a key technology for improving the performance of radar systems required to operate in the presence of severe and dynamic interference which generally includes clutter as well as jamming. While the theory of optimum STAP is well known, practical issues, such as interference heterogeneity, finite sample support, mismatched signal models and computational load, need to be overcome when it comes to implementing STAP in operational radar systems. This paper proposes an advanced STAP formulation which addresses important issues facing practical implementation and then tailors this general formulation for the case of interference rejection in over-the-horizon (OTH) radar to evaluate experimentally its target detection and localisation performance.