1 research outputs found
Robust Covariance Matrix Estimation for Radar Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP)
Estimating the disturbance or clutter covariance is a centrally important
problem in radar space time adaptive processing (STAP). The disturbance
covariance matrix should be inferred from training sample observations in
practice. Large number of homogeneous training samples are generally not
available because of difficulty of guaranteeing target free disturbance
observation, practical limitations imposed by the spatio-temporal
nonstationarity, and system considerations. In this dissertation, we look to
address the aforementioned challenges by exploiting physically inspired
constraints into ML estimation. While adding constraints is beneficial to
achieve satisfactory performance in the practical regime of limited training,
it leads to a challenging problem. We focus on breaking this classical
trade-off between computational tractability and desirable performance
measures, particularly in training starved regimes. In particular, we exploit
both the structure of the disturbance covariance and importantly the knowledge
of the clutter rank to yield a new rank constrained maximum likelihood (RCML)
estimator. In addition, we derive a new covariance estimator for STAP that
jointly considers a Toeplitz structure and a rank constraint on the clutter
component.
Finally, we address the problem of working with inexact physical radar
parameters under a practical radar environment. We propose a robust covariance
estimation method via an expected likelihood (EL) approach. We analyze
covariance estimation algorithms under three different cases of imperfect
constraints: 1) only rank constraint, 2) both rank and noise power constraint,
and 3) condition number constraint. For each case, we formulate estimation of
the constraint as an optimization problem with the EL criterion and formally
derive and prove a significant analytical result such as uniqueness of the
solution