Xia Xianggen

Doppler distributed clutter model of airborne radar and its parameters estimation

To characterize the clutter spectrum center-shift and spread of airborne radar caused by the platform motion, a novel Doppler Distributed Clutter (DDC) model is proposed to describe the clutter covariance matrix in temporal domain. Based on this parametric model, maximum likelihood, subspace based method and other super-resolution methods are introduced into the Doppler parameters estimation, and more excellent performance is obtained than with the conventional approaches in frequency domain. The theoretical derivation and real experimental results are also provided to validate this novel model and methods of parameter estimating.

Novel parametric optimum processing method for airborne radar

In radar target detection, an optimum processor needs to automatically adapt its weights to the environment change. Conventionally, the optimum weights are obtained by substantial independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) interference samplings, which is not always realistic in an inhomogeneous clutter background of airborne radar. The lack of i.i.d. samplings will inevitably lead to performance deterioration for optimum processing. In this paper, a novel parametric adaptive processing method is proposed for airborne radar target detection based on the modified Doppler distributed clutter (DDC) model with contribution of clutter’s internal motion. It is different from the conventional methods in that the adaptive weights are determined by two parameters of DDC model, i.e., angular center and spread. A low-complexity nonlinear operators approach is also proposed to estimate these parameters. Simulation and performance analysis are also provided to show that the proposed method can remarkably reduce the dependence of i.i.d. samplings and it is computationally efficient for practical use.