Beam-augmented spacetime adaptive processing

Abstract

Combined monostatic clutter (MSC) and terrain scattered interference (TSI) pose a dicult challenge for adaptive radar processing. Mitigation techniques exist for each in-terference alone but are insucient for their combined ef-fects. Current approaches separate the problem into two stages where TSI is suppressed rst and then MSC. The problem with this cascade approach is that during the ini-tial TSI suppression stage, the MSC becomes corrupted. In this paper an innovative technique is introduced for achiev-ing a signicant improvement in cancellation performance for both MSC and TSI, even when the jammer appears in the mainbeam. The majority of the interference rejec-tion, both TSI and MSC, is accomplished with an MSC lter, with further TSI suppression accomplished via an ad-ditional tapped reference beam. Simultaneous optimization of the MSC lter weights and reference beam weights yields the desired processor. Performance results using Mountain-top data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed pro-cessor over existing processors. 1