Multi-Frame STAP Strategy in Range-Doppler Domain for Airborne Radars

In airborne radar system, clutter suppression and dim target detection are two challenging problems. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) can provide good clutter suppression potential. Nevertheless, the low energy of dim targets and the energy loss after STAP make traditional detection method invalid. Based on the problem, the multi-frame joint space-time adaptive processing strategy (MF-STAP) is proposed. Through the multi-frame accumulation, dim targets can be clearly distinguished from the clutter. The original MF-STAP restrict attention to the range domain, which we refer to as range domain MF-STAP (R-MF-STAP) in this paper. Whereas, the elimination of Doppler parameter brings raw information loss and miss detection. To remedy this deficiency, we propose a range-Doppler domain MF-STAP strategy (RD-MF-STAP) in this paper, operating multi-frame accumulation at both range and Doppler domain after STAP process. The performance assessment, conducted resorting to Monte Carlo simulation, shows that the proposed RD-MF-STAP strategy can achieve superior detection and tracking performance than R-MF-STAP strategy.