Robust STAP approach in nonhomogeneous clutter environments

Abstract

The new generation airborne phased array radars widely adopt flexible multiple-beam so that they have multiple functions. In this paper, a robust STAP approach with space-time multiple-beam (STMB) architecture is proposed, which has a low degree of freedom and limits the required secondary data for covariance matrix estimation. A new sample selection scheme based on the correlation dimension has been proposed, which is very suitable for the nonhomogeneous clutter environments. The experimental simulation results indicate that incorporating nonhomogeneity detection with the space-time adaptive processor dramatically improves the detection performance for airborne radar.