Range recursive space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for MIMO airborne RADAR

International audienceThis paper presents a range recursive algorithm for the space time adaptive processing (STAP) of multi input multi output (MIMO) airborne radar signals involved in clutter rejection for the detection of slowly moving ground targets. The MIMO aspect comes from the fact that the transmitter consists of an array of spaced elements sending non coher-ent waveforms and that the receiver is a conventional array used for spatial clutter rejection. The transposition of the STAP algorithms from the single input multi output (SIMO) systems to the MIMO ones has been claimed to theoretically improve performance in clutter resolution and rejection. However, even if this transposition is conceptually easy, in practice, the convergence and the complexity of the MIMO-STAP algorithms are higher than for SIMO models. After reconsidering the advantages and drawbacks of the ex-tended MIMO-STAP, namely the the sample matrix inversion (SMI) and eigencanceller (EC), algorithms, we propose the fast approximated power iteration (FAPI) range recursive algorithm as an alternative to resolve the convergence and complexity problem