Moving target feature extraction for airborne high-range resolution phased-array radar

We study the feature extraction of moving targets in the presence of temporally and spatially correlated ground clutter for airborne high-range resolution (HRR) phased-array radar. To avoid the range migration problems that occur in HRR radar data, we first divide the HRR range profiles into low-range resolution (LRR) segments. Since each LRR segment contains a sequence of HRR range bins, no information is lost due to the division, and hence, no loss of resolution occurs. We show how to use a vector auto-regressive (VAR) filtering technique to suppress the ground clutter, Then, a parameter estimation algorithm is proposed for target feature extraction. From the VAR-filtered data, the target Doppler frequency and the spatial signature vectors are first estimated by using a maximum likelihood (ML) method. The target phase history and direction-of-arrival (DOA) (or the array steering vector for an unknown array manifold) are then estimated from the spatial signature vectors by minimizing a weighted least squares (WLS) cost function. The target radar cross section (RCS)-related complex amplitude and range-related frequency of each target scatterer are then extracted from the estimated target phase history by using RELAX, which is a relaxation-based high-resolution feature extraction algorithm. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm