Target detection in heterogeneous airborne radar interference using 3D STAP

Heterogeneous interference is common-place in the airborne radar problem. Space-time adaptive processing fundamentals have struggled in the presence of such data. Originally, the solution involved simply increasing secondary data support, essentially "drowning" out heterogeneous interference effects. Research then progressed into identifying specific range cells containing heterogeneous interference and excising these cells from interference estimates. Yet, the target detection problem within heterogeneous interference remained. Therefore, research efforts abandoned statistical techniques and shifted towards deterministic methods with some success. Finally, the advent of a two-dimensional hybrid approach combined the diverse statistical and deterministic techniques into a single framework. This research effort continues in this vein by expanding the method into three-dimensions: azimuth, Doppler, and elevation. A 23 dB improvement over the three-dimensional joint domain localized method (3D-JDL) is shown for a specific heterogeneous interference case.