An Extended F＄A Method for Airborne Radar Clutter Suppression

Time-Space Cascaded method (F＄A) is a typical Post-Doppler method, which can significantly reduce the clutter degrees of freedom via clutter location and is a good rank-reduced STAP method when the target steering vector is precisely matched. In practical, in order to realize the real-time processing in engineering applications, the optimal clutter rejection weighting is usually applied to achieve the balance between the computational complexity and target detection performance. However, when the clutter internal motion is severe, F＄A may suffer from the clutter rejection performance degration significantly. To deal with this issue, an extended F＄A method is proposed in this paper, which applies two auxiliary channels with high correlation to the main Doppler channel to improve the clutter rejection performance without greatly increasing the computational burden. Data processing results of simulation and airborne array radar system have been provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method respectively.