Moving target detection under spatially non-homogeneous clutter for airborne phased-MIMO radar

This paper considers the problem of moving target detection in phased-MIMO radar on an airborne platform. The generalized likelihood ratio test has been employed for the detection. The proposed detector employs the clutter subspace information and maximum likelihood parameters estimation in order to improve its performance in strong clutter environments. First, a space-time signal model for phased-MIMO radar with arbitrary antennas placements in three-dimensional space is presented. According to the space-time characteristics of clutter and clutter ridge slope, the clutter subspace matrix for ground clutter is presented. The generalized maximum likelihood detector for detection of moving target signal in the presence of clutter signal with known subspace matrix and colored noise is obtained. It is shown that it has the constant false alarm rate property. The performance of the proposed detector is validated by simulation results.