Space-time adaptive processing for sea clutter and jamming suppression in radar seekers

When radar seeker searches and tracks moving target on sea surface, sea clutter spectra severely spread out due to the strong effect of sea conditions. Conventional methods for suppressing sea clutter have achieved poor performance. This paper mainly analyzes the sea clutter characteristics in azimuth-Doppler domain and clutter spectra with different scanning angles. Then space-time adaptive processing (STAP) technique is applied to suppress sea clutter. Research results indicate that sea clutter spectra have some special characteristics in space-time distribution, and the proposed STAP algorithm can detect slow moving targets effectively as it can suppress sea clutter and strong jamming.