Compensation of clutter spectrum for forward-looking radar based on the spatial steering vector fitting

The clutter spectrum depends highly on range for forward-looking radars, which results in heterogeneous ground clutter in space-time adaptive processing (STAP). A new method for the range-dependence of clutter spectrum is proposed. The method firstly obtains a transform matrix by fitting the spatial steering vector of the range gate under test with that of secondary range gate. The transform matrix is then applied to spatial data at a given Doppler gate to compensate clutter spectrum, thus achieving an identical clutter spectrum. The conventional STAP could exploit the compensated data for the clutter suppression. Simulation results show a good improvement in processor performance.