Range recursive space time adaptive processing (STAP) for MIMO airborne radar

This paper presents a range recursive algorithm for the space time adaptive processing (STAP) of multi input multi output (MIMO) airborne radar signals involved in clutter rejection for the detection of slow moving ground targets. The MIMO aspect comes from the fact that the transmitter consists of an array of spaced elements sending non coherent waveforms and that the receiver is a conventional array used for spatial clutter rejection. The transposition of the STAP algorithms from the single input multi output (SIMO) systems to the MIMO ones has been claimed to theoretically improve performance in clutter resolution and rejection. However, even if this transposition is conceptually easy, in practice, the convergence and the computational complexity of the MIMO-STAP algorithms are higher than for SIMO models. After reconsidering the advantages and drawbacks of the extended MIMO-STAP, namely the sample matrix in-version (SMI) and eigencanceller (EC) algorithms, we pro-pose the fast approximated power iteration (FAPI) range recursive algorithm as an alternative to resolve the convergence and complexity problems.