Performance of adaptive optimal Doppler processors in heterogeneous clutter

The performance of adaptive Hsiao (1974) optimal filters in suppressing spatially varying radar clutter is investigated. Three classes of heterogeneous clutter are studied: the amplitude and spectral width in each range bin drawn from spatially invariant independent gamma distributed processes; clutter edges, in which the range profiles of the amplitude and/or spectrum exhibit a step change; and homogeneous clutter, in which some range bins are corrupted by point clutter sources of extraneous targets. The use of a prefilter moving target indicator (MTI) is investigated as a means of reducing losses in improvement factor (IF). It is shown that adaptive filters suffer significant reductions in IF in heterogeneous clutter environments.