A heterogeneous clutter suppression method based on subarrays

Most fighter aircraft is equipped with forward looking radar. The forward looking radar worked at the medium or high pulse repetition frequency causes ambiguous clutter and an elevation dependent angle-Doppler relationship in the clutter returns. The heterogeneity induced by shortrange and ambiguous clutter will degrade the adaptive clutter suppress performance. A heterogeneous clutter suppression method for forward looking airborne radar based on subarrays is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can use subarray elevation degrees of freedom to improve the performance in heterogeneous clutter circumstance and simultaneously reduce system complexity and computation load. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional method and can improve heterogeneous clutter suppression performance dramatically.