A comparative study of clutter rejection techniques in airborne radar

The authors present radar detection, performance analysis results for targets in highly nonhomogeneous clutter environments where conventional adaptive array processing techniques are not feasible. For this case, the performance of an adaptive array processing technique which uses an angle-Doppler domain localized generalized likelihood ratio test is compared to that of a conventional displaced phase center aperture (DPCA) processor. When the measurement data available for estimation of clutter statistics is limited due to a severely nonhomogeneous environment, the conventional data-domain adaptive implementations of the joint domain optimal processor become undesirable because of their slow convergence (poor data efficiency) and heavy computation load. Under these conditions, the joint angle-Doppler domain localized generalized likelihood ratio test processor outperforms any conventional adaptive array processor, and is also shown to outperform the DPCA-based processor