Adaptive pulse compression via maximum signal minus interference level in clutter environments

Standard matched filter for pulse compression causes high range sidelobes, which may mask neighboring small targets. The adaptive pulse compression (APC) based on reiterative minimum mean square error (RMMSE) can mitigate the range sidelobes in white noise. However, its performance degrades in clutter environments. In this paper, an APC algorithm based on maximum signal minus interference level criterion (MaxSMIL) is proposed, in which the result of signal power minus interference power is maximized so that interferences including range sidelobes, clutter and noise are suppressed adaptively. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the APC based on RMMSE in Weibull clutter environment.