Comparison of DPCA and STAP for space-based radar

Researchers have developed and examined adaptive moving target indicator (MTI) techniques that are able to cope with significant clutter spectral spreading that occurs for a radar mounted on a moving platform. In particular, displaced phase centre antenna (DPCA) techniques and space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques have been applied to airborne and space-based radars (SBR). Much work has been applied to the airborne MTI (AMTI) problem, where the literature seems to favour the use of STAP techniques over DPCA. The paper focuses on the SBR problem and examines some of the key differences between the airborne and space-based environments. In addition, the presence of targets is discussed with respect to the effect they have on target improvement factor. These discussions suggest that DPCA, rather than STAP, may well provide the better cost/performance trade-off for SBR.