Effects of bistatic clutter dispersion on STAP systems

The performance of several space-time adaptive processing (STAP) approaches in bistatic applications is analysed. Specific consideration is given to the effects of bistatic clutter spectral dispersion on covariance estimation and the algorithm´s resulting clutter-rejection capability. The role of adaptive processing methods capable of high performance with efficient utilisation of the required training data is emphasised. A deterministic two-dimensional (angle-Doppler) compensation technique is used as a pre-processor and is compared to the Doppler warping approach. The algorithm performance is assessed using the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) compared to that of the matched filter with a known covariance.