Optimal reduced-rank 3D STAP for joint hot and cold clutter mitigation

Abstract

A novel signal processing strategy is presented which provides optimal signal-dependent rank reduction for the 3D STAP hot and cold clutter mitigation problem. Through the use of spatial (angle) and PRI temporal (Doppler) degrees-of-freedom, conventional 2D STAP can cancel both monostatic ("cold") clutter and direct path jamming. However, additional "fast-time" degrees of freedom (on the order of the reciprocal of the receiver bandwidth) are required to cancel so-called "hot" clutter formed by jammer terrain-scattered interference. A multistage decomposition of the 3D sidelobe canceler (Wiener filter) is introduced both to evaluate the theoretical performance limits of rank reduction and to demonstrate that a more compact compression of the interference is possible than that obtained by the principal-components method. A high-fidelity simulated data set, based on DTED measurements, is employed to illustrate the efficacy of the multistage Wiener filtering approach to 3D STAP.