Joint Clutter Suppression and Coherent Integration Method for High-Speed Target Energy Focusing with Airborne Radar

Abstract

Conference Title: IGARSS 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium

Conference Start Date: 2025 Aug. 3

Conference End Date: 2025 Aug. 8

Conference Location: Brisbane, Australia

Significant target energy focusing is a prerequisite for effective detection and synthetic aperture imaging with airborne radar. However, it is inevitably to confront two main issues for low altitude high-speed target energy focusing: One is the strong clutter component in the echo may shelter the target energy. The other is the high-speed motion may cause severe range migration (RM) and then shorten the focusing period. To address these issues, it is common to perform serial processing for space-time adaptive processing (STAP) and coherent integration (CI) based RM correction. Therefore, this paper presents a joint implementation method based on Radon-STAP, which is different from the traditional serial processing. First, the target RM is converted into phase variation through Fourier transform (FT) along fast time dimension. Next, the RM-Doppler joint compensation filter is designed. Finally, the improved space-time adaptive filtering is implemented to obtain the results of energy focusing by joint clutter suppression and CI. The results of numerical simulation and real-measured data processing validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.