Robust short-range clutter suppression algorithm for forward looking airborne radar

The short-range clutter has serious range dependence for forward looking airborne radar (FLAR). As a result, when a radar detects moving targets on far range gates, the ambiguous short-range clutter degrades the performance of ground moving target indication (GMTI) obtained by space-time adaptive processing (STAP). The elevation three dimensional adaptive processing can well mitigate the problem, but, the computational load of the method is too heavy to be applied in real scenarios. A robust elevation pre-filtering algorithm is proposed. This method does not need adaptive processing on the elevation elements in a planar-array antenna. Therefore, the computational load can be reduced greatly. This method suppresses the ambiguous short-range clutter by multi-elevation angles restriction and the cancellation weight on the clutter has a deep and wide notch. Moreover, the method is robust to the elevation angle errors. Simulation results show the validity of the method.