Efficient space-time adaptive processing for airborne MTI-mode radar

Space-time adaptive array processing has emerged as a key technology thrust area for the next generation of airborne radar systems due to its inherent potential for vastly improving moving target indicator (MTI) performance. Unfortunately, these performance gains come with a commensurate increase in on-line computational complexity if full degree-of-freedom (DOF) space time adaptive processing (STAP) processors are employed. In this paper we introduce a class of efficient STAP processors which exploit the fact that the full DOF space-time clutter covariance matrix is rank deficient with respect to a coherent processing interval