Airborne GMTI clutter suppression performance utilizing a wideband sparse array

Airborne multichannel SAR-GMTI radar is capable of detecting very slow moving targets on the ground. Such radar may employ a large sparse antenna array, a wideband waveform, and long CPI to simultaneously achieve strong clutter cancellation and fine spatial resolution in the cross-track range and the along-track cross range dimensions. In this paper, analytic solutions of the target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss will be presented to characterize the clutter cancellation performance of adaptive array processing. The closed-form expression of the SNR loss may be conveniently used to trade off SAR-GMTI radar design parameters such as the SAR integration angle, the waveform spectrum, and the sparse array structure without the need of executing numerical simulations with excessive computational load.