Effects of bistatic clutter dispersion on STAP systems

In this paper, we analyze the performance of several space-time adaptive processing (STAP) approaches in bistatic applications. Specific consideration is given to the effects of bistatic clutter spectral dispersion on covariance estimation and the algorithm´s resulting clutter rejection capability. We emphasize the role of adaptive processing methods capable of high performance with efficient utilization of training data. A deterministic two-dimensional (angle-Doppler) compensation technique is used as a preprocessor and is compared to the Doppler warping approach. Algorithm performance is assessed using the output signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) compared to that of the matched filter with known covariance.