An improved STAP algorithm by applying APES

Over the past few decades, GMTI techniques have played an important role in the war. Recently, space-time adaptive processing, as one of GMTI techniques has shown the potential to adaptively cancel the clutter and has been widely used for GMTI radar. For advanced airborne radar system, it must be able to suppress undesired clutter, jamming, and thermal noise so as to detect targets. The problem is complicated due to the motion of the platform, as the ground clutter received by the radar is spread out in range, spatial angle, and also over Doppler. Traditional one-dimensional (1-D) processing strategy is insufficient for separating the moving target from ground clutter. In 1973, Brennan and Reed proposed space-time adaptive processing (STAP) method, which adaptively processes returns from multiple pulses and multiple channels (2-D) to attenuate interference power while preserving target power. Although STAP has good performance in clutter suppression, however usually large number of pulses and channels are required, it means that high computational load is unavoidable. This paper proposed a method by using Amplitude and Phase Estimation (APES) approach to improve the STAP performance without increasing the number of pulses and the number of channels, and in hence, without introducing high computational complexity. Simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the method.