Spatio-temporal adaptive detector in non-homogeneous and low-rank clutter

Reducing the number of secondary data used to estimate the Clutter Covariance Matrix (CCM) for Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) techniques is still an active research topic. Low rank CCM estimates have already been proposed but only for homogeneous and Gaussian clutter. We propose in this paper to extend the low-rank CCM methods for heterogeneous and/or non-Gaussian clutter. We derive a new detector based on low-rank techniques and exploiting properties of the Normalized Sample Covariance Matrix (NSCM). This detector is shown to exhibit a smaller SNR loss than classical STAP detectors. Moreover, the new detector has a texture-CFAR property with respect to non-Gaussian SIRV model and has more robust behavior when some targets are present in the secondary data. We also give experimental comparison results between the classical STAP detectors and the new one for STAP data.