Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive MTI Filter

The design and evaluation of an adaptive moving target indicator (MTI) filter, the adaptive canceler for extended clutter (ACEC) is dealt with, taking into consideration adaptivity to clutter mean Doppler frequency. This consideration is one of the most important operational requirements in adaptive MTI's and permits a relatively simple hardware implementation as compared to more general optimization and adaptivity criteria (briefly described). The ACEC's algorithm compensates in real time for the clutter mean Doppler frequency. Performances have been obtained by digital computer simulation in various operational conditions.     

Automated Tracking for Aircraft Surveillance Radar Systems

An improved moving target detector (MTD) (a digital signal processor) has been designed, constructed, and tested which successfully rejects all forms of radar clutter while providing reliable detection of all aircraft within the coverage of the radar. The MTD is being tested on both terminal and enroute surveillance radars for the FAA. This processor has been integrated with automatic tracking algorithms to give complete rejection of ground clutter, heavy precipitation, and angels (birds).     

A localized adaptive MTD processor

The problem of achieving the optimum moving target indicator (MTI) detection performance in strong clutter of unknown spectrum when the set of data available to the estimation of clutter statistics is small due to a severely nonhomogeneous environment is studied. A new adaptive implementation, called the Doppler domain localized generalized likelihood ratio processor (DDL-GLR), is proposed, and its detection performance is studied in detail. It is shown that the DDL-GLR is a data-efficient implementation of the high-order optimum detector and has several advantages of practical importance over the adaptive processors     

基于3DT的空时自适应单脉冲参数估计算法

空时自适应处理(STAP)是机载预警雷达抑制杂波和干扰的一项关键技术,而多普勒三通道联合自适应处理(3DT)是适合工程实现的降维(RD)STAP方法。STAP目标检测后还需进一步估计目标的角度参数,因此将自适应单脉冲(AM)技术引入3DT,提出了一种高精度联合估计目标速度与方位空间角的空时自适应单脉冲算法。理论分析与仿真实验结果表明,当目标多普勒频率偏离检测多普勒单元中心频率时,该算法能同时减少目标多普勒跨越损失和空时导引矢量失配损失,进而提高输出信杂噪比(SCNR),改善目标测角精度。     

An MTI Technique for Processing Radar Measurements of a Waking Reentry Body

A processing technique based on pulse-cancellation techniques familiar in moving target indicator (MTI) radar is proposed for separating (in Doppler) echoes of a reentry body traveling at hypersonic velocities from those of its lower velocity turbulent wake appearing in the same range cell. The cancellation technique is implemented by forming the sum of the products of binomial weighting coefficients of alternating sign with the complex echoes of a small number of closely spaced transmitted coherent pulses; thereby, in effect, synthesizing a digital canceler. The ability of the two-and three-pulse canceler to estimate body RCS in the presence of attached wake is demonstrated by employing coherent burst data collected by the AMRAD radar for a mission flown at the White Sands Missile Range. Estimates of body RCS obtained from the two-and three-pulse canceler compare favorably to the corresponding estimates obtained from a 30-pulse Doppler periodogram for this mission. Expressions for both the achievable wake rejection ratio and the mean and standard deviation of the body power estimate of the N-pulse canceler are derived as a function of the wake parameters, assuming Gaussian wake statistics.     

Comparison between monostatic and bistatic antenna configurationsfor STAP

The unique characteristics of bistatic radar operation on the performance of airborne/spaceborne moving target indicator (MTI) radars that use space-time adaptive processing (STAP) are discussed. It has been shown that monostatic STAP radar has the following properties. 1) For a horizontal flight path and a planar Earth the curves of constant clutter Doppler (isodops) are hyperbolas. 2) For a sidelooking antenna geometry the clutter Doppler is range independent. 3) Clutter trajectories in the cosφ-F plane (F=normalized Doppler) are in general ellipses (or straight lines for a sidelooking array). We demonstrate that these well-known properties are distorted by the displacement between transmitter and receiver in a bistatic configuration. It is shown that even for the sidelooking array geometry the clutter Doppler is range-dependent which requires adaptation of the STAP processor for each individual range gate. Conclusions for the design of STAP processors are drawn     

Low cost Doppler ratio detection radar with interclutter visibility

A low cost concept, called Doppler ratio detection (DRD), for suppressing the clutter residue of Doppler radars is described. The concept provides a simple way to establish a target detect-clutter reject threshold at each range cell, whether a MTI canceler only or a bank of Doppler filters is used. In its simplest form, the target detect/clutter reject threshold is based on the ratio of the magnitudes of Doppler-processed and non-Doppler processed signals. The experiment showed that clutter was rejected, but the amount of added degradation in detection sensitivity was not determined. This degradation will depend on a number of factors, including the number of pulses per beamwidth     

MTI Processing and Weibull-Distributed Ground Clutter

It is shown that the Weibull-distributed ground clutter obeys a Weibull distribution after processing by the double canceler moving target indicator (MTI).     

An effect of range-heterogeneous clutter on adaptive Dopplerfilters

The practical implementation of adaptive Doppler filters requires estimates of clutter parameters to determine the adaptive weights. A method of deriving the estimate via the sample matrix inversion (SMI) algorithm using multiple data snapshots from adjacent range cells is presented. For homogeneous clutter environments, the results of this technique asymptotically approach the optimum (a priori known covariance matrix) as the number of snapshots approaches infinity; this asymptotic behavior does not occur for heterogeneous clutter environments. An equation for the decrease in improvement factor is derived. To promote understanding, the simplified special case of narrowband clutter is considered in detail. In almost all cases, the loss is small     

Adaptive Radar Detection in Doubly Nonstationary Autoregressive Doppler Spread Clutter

The problem of adaptive radar detection in clutter which is nonstationary both in slow and fast time is addressed. Nonstationarity within a coherent processing interval (CPI) often precludes target detection because of the masking induced by Doppler spreading of the clutter. Across range bins (i.e., fast time), nonstationarity severely limits the amount of training data available to estimate the noise covariance matrix required for adaptive detection. Such difficult clutter conditions are not uncommon in complex multipath propagation conditions where path lengths can change abruptly in dynamic scenarios. To mitigate nonstationary Doppler spread clutter, an approximation to the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detector is presented wherein the CPI from the hypothesized target range is used for both clutter estimation and target detection. To overcome the lack of training data, a modified time-varying autoregressive (TVAR) model is assumed for the clutter return. In particular, maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of the TVAR parameters, computed from a single snapshot of data, are used in a GLRT for detecting stationary targets in possibly abruptly nonstationary clutter. The GLRT is compared with three alternative methods including a conceptually simpler ad hoc approach based on extrapolation of quasi-stationary data segments. Detection performance is assessed using simulated targets in both synthetically-generated and real radar clutter. Results suggest the proposed GLRT with TVAR clutter modeling can provide between 5–8 dB improvement in signal-to-clutter plus noise ratio (SCNR) when compared with the conventional methods.     

Reiterative median cascaded canceler for robust adaptive array processing

A new robust adaptive processor based on reiterative application of the median cascaded canceler (MCC) is presented and called the reiterative median cascaded canceler (RMCC). It is shown that the RMCC processor is a robust replacement for the sample matrix inversion (SMI) adaptive processor and for its equivalent implementations. The MCC, though a robust adaptive processor, has a convergence rate that is dependent on the rank of the input interference-plus-noise covariance matrix for a given number of adaptive degrees of freedom (DOF), N. In contrast, the RMCC, using identical training data as the MCC, exhibits the highly desirable combination of: 1) convergence-robustness to outliers/targets in adaptive weight training data, like the MCC, and 2) fast convergence performance that is independent of the input interference-plus-noise covariance matrix, unlike the MCC. For a number of representative examples, the RMCC is shown to converge using ~ 2.8N samples for any interference rank value as compared with ~ 2N samples for the SMI algorithm. However, the SMI algorithm requires considerably more samples to converge in the presence of outliers/targets, whereas the RMCC does not. Both simulated data as well as measured airborne radar data from the multichannel airborne radar measurements (MCARM) space-time adaptive processing (STAP) database are used to illustrate performance improvements over SMI methods.     

空域数据重排的后多普勒自适应处理方法

传统的后多普勒自适应处理方法,如因子法(FA)和扩展因子法(EFA)虽然能大大降低自适应处理时的运算量和独立同分布样本的需求量,但由于实际中均匀训练样本数目的限制,当天线阵元数进一步增大时,FA和EFA抑制杂波和检测动目标的能力会显著恶化。针对这一问题,提出了一种空域数据重排的后多普勒自适应处理方法。该方法将多普勒滤波后的空域数据重排为一行列数相近的矩阵,空域滤波器权系数也表示成可分离的形式,从而得到一双二次代价函数,利用循环迭代的思想求解权系数。实验表明该方法具有快速收敛,所需训练样本少的优点,尤其在大阵列、小样本条件下该方法抑制杂波的性能明显优于FA和EFA。     

Measurements of L-band inland-water surface-clutter Doppler spectra

Although radar surface-clutter reflectivities from terrain are generally much greater than those from water, strong Bragg resonances at low but non-zero Doppler frequencies in backscatter from small inland bodies of water might potentially cause false alarms for moving target indicator (MTI) or other Doppler signal-processing techniques designed for target detection in ground clutter. To provide data for investigating this concern, measurements of L-band radar backscatter were recorded from the surface of a small inland freshwater reservoir in central Massachusetts. These measurements were of unusually high system stability and spectral purity so as to provide up to 80 dB of available spectral dynamic range. Strong Bragg spikes occurred in the clutter Doppler spectra from the reservoir at low (3 to 4 Hz) but non-zero Doppler frequencies. This strong Bragg resonance was persistent in time and space throughout the measurements. Spectral results are presented for all four combinations of linear polarization. Comparison with tree clutter spectral results indicates that, when an occasional water body comes under surveillance at vertical polarization in otherwise generally forested terrain, water clutter spectral density is expected to exceed surrounding-terrain tree clutter spectral densities in the Bragg-offset Doppler vicinity by large amounts     

一种机载雷达两级降维空时二维自适应处理方法

 提出了一种机载相控阵雷达杂波抑制的两级降维空时自适应处理(STAP)方法,即：先根据杂波分布先验信息进行空时局域化(JDL)降维处理,然后对局域化输出进行多级维纳滤波(MWF),实现二次降维。该方法综合了固定结构和自适应结构降维技术的优点,将JDL处理引入到MWF中,从而有效降低MWF的杂波自由度。计算机仿真和理论分析表明本文方法比JDL自适应处理方法和全空时MWF方法具有更小的运算量,对阵元随机幅相误差具有很好的容差能力,是一种稳健的两级降维自适应处理方法。最后,基于仿真和实测数据的实验验证了算法的有效性。     

Airborne/spacebased radar STAP using a structured covariance matrix

It is shown that partial information about the airborne/spacebased (A/S) clutter covariance matrix (CCM) can be used effectively to significantly enhance the convergence performance of a block-processed space/time adaptive processor (STAP) in a clutter and jamming environment. The partial knowledge of the CCM is based upon the simplified general clutter model (GCM) which has been developed by the airborne radar community. A priori knowledge of parameters which should be readily measurable (but not necessarily accurate) by the radar platform associated with this model is assumed. The GCM generates an assumed CCM. The assumed CCM along with exact knowledge of the thermal noise covariance matrix is used to form a maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of the unknown interference covariance matrix which is used by the STAP. The new algorithm that employs the a priori clutter and thermal noise covariance information is evaluated using two clutter models: 1) a mismatched GCM, and 2) the high-fidelity Research Laboratory STAP clutter model. For both clutter models, the new algorithm performed significantly better (i.e., converged faster) than the sample matrix inversion (SMI) and fast maximum likelihood (FML) STAP algorithms, the latter of which uses only information about the thermal noise covariance matrix.     

Robust space-time adaptive processing for airborne radar in nonhomogeneous clutter environments

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) holds tremendous potential for the new generation airborne surveillance radar, in which the phased array antennas and pulse Doppler processing mode are adopted. A new STAP approach using the multiple-beam and multiple Doppler channels is presented here for airborne phased array radar. The approach with space-time multiple-beam (STMB) architecture is robust to array errors and has very low system degrees of freedom (DOFs). Hence, it has low sample support requirement and it is very suitable for the practical planar phased array radar under nonhomogeneous clutter environments. Meanwhile, a new nonhomogeneous detector (NHD) based on the correlation dimension (CD) is also proposed here, which is used as an effective method to screen tracing data prior to detection processing. It can further improve the performance of the STAP approach in the severely nonhomogeneous clutter environments. Therefore, a scheme that incorporates the correlation dimension nonhomogeneity detector (CD-NHD) with the STMB is recommended, which we term CD-NHD-STMB. The experimental simulation results indicate that: 1) the STMB processor is robust to array element error and has high performance under nonhomogeneous clutter environments; 2) the CD-NHD is also effective on the nonhomogeneous clutter. As a result, the CD-NHD-STMB scheme is robust to array element error and nonhomogeneous clutter, and therefore available for airborne phased array radar applications.     

Design of MTI Radar on the Basis of Detection Probability

A single (quadrature) channel moving target indicator (MTI) radar system employing a tapped delay line filter is analyzed. The point of view taken is that of optimal clutter rejection in conjunction with subsequent receiver decision operations. The random nature of the spread of target Doppler shifts is taken into account. Based on the above, a procedure is presented by means of which the detection probability can be numerically evaluated for an optimized filter frequency response.     

Doppler Processor Rejection of Range Ambiguous Clutter

Doppler processors are used in radar to separate target returns from clutter. When the clutter is at a range farther than the unambiguous range of the radar, the ability to reject the clutter is degraded. In this article the degradation is analyzed for an N-pulse batch processor with Dolph weighting, and the results show how degradation varies with design sidelobe level.     

机载MIMO雷达空时自适应杂波对消器

针对机载多输入多输出(MIMO)雷达杂波分布呈现空时耦合特性,提出一种空时自适应杂波对消器.利用机载MIMO雷达的脉冲回波数据,构造杂波对消器的系数矩阵.通过空时自适应杂波对消器的预处理,可以有效地抑制杂波,并通过与常规空时处理算法的级联,最终可以有效提高动目标的检测性能.实现了由传统地基雷达杂波对消器向机载运动平台的推广.仿真结果表明,这种自适应杂波对消器不仅适用于正侧视雷达,对于非正侧视雷达也同样适用.     

Super resolution feature extraction of moving targets

High range resolution (HRR) moving target indicator (MTI) is becoming increasingly important for many military and civilian applications such as the detection and classification of moving targets in strong clutter background. We consider the problem of extracting the HRR features of moving targets with very closely spaced scatterers in the presence of strong stationary clutter, where the range migration and Doppler frequency are taken into account. A relaxation-based algorithm, which is robust and computationally simple, is proposed to deal with the above problem. Numerical results have shown that the proposed algorithm exhibits super resolution and excellent estimation performance