Mitigation of Ground Clutter in Airborne Bistatic Radar Systems

Space-Time Adaptive Processing is a commonly used technique to mitigate ground clutter reflections from an airborne radar system. It estimates a covariance matrix based on spatial and temporal information, and the estimate is thereafter used to suppress the ground clutter. In a side-looking monostatic radar system, the adaptivity of the estimate is rather straight forward based on radar observations. However, in this paper, we consider bistatic systems where the power of adaptivity is limited due to nonstationarity of the ground clutter reflections over the range dimension. To overcome this, scenario dependent transformations are commonly used when forming the sample covariance matrix. In this contribution we instead investigate a detector where the clutter covariance matrix is determined from the geometry of the bistatic scenario. Using a Monte-Carlo simulation, we investigate how sensitive the detector is to errors in the assumed geometry, and compare this with state-of-the-art adaptive methods. The results indicates that a good clutter rejection is obtained for errors of order 10^3 m for assumed transmitter position and 10^0 km/h for assumed transmitter velocity.