Radar clutter mitigation via space-time wavefront adaptive sensing

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) in complex radar propagation and inhomogeneous clutter environments is often precluded because neither the target wavefront is sufficiently known nor is signal-free training data available. In recent work, wavefront adaptive sensing (WAS) was proposed to overcome these challenges by combining minimum variance (MV) adaptive processing and blind source separation (BSS) for distributed sources. In this paper, WAS is compared with conventional BSS and MV processing both analytically and via simulation. In an over- the-horizon radar (OTHR) spread-Doppler clutter environment, WAS is shown to avoid MV signal cancellation at high SNR and poor BSS threshold performance at low SNR.