A new adaptive displaced phase centre antenna processor

Employing the principle of displaced phase centre antenna (DPCA) and the model of autoregressive (AR) processing, we construct an optimal adaptive DPCA processor for moving target detection in airborne phased array radar data collected under non-DPCA conditions. The proposed processor is fundamentally different from the existing ADPCA which is not optimal. The number of range samples needed to estimate its parameters is only approximately twice the number of antenna elements, significantly less than the number required by the conventional space-time adaptive processing (STAP) and other algorithms. Computationally it only requires 5-10% the cost of STAP. The processor has been tested using both simulated and measured airborne phased array radar data. With ample samples, its performance approaches optimum. In the case of a reduced number of samples, it considerably outperforms STAP and the other algorithms examined.