Reciprocal-Filter-Based STAP for Passive Radar on Moving Platforms

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems Vol. 55; no. 2; pp. 967 - 988
• Main Authors: Wojaczek, Philipp, Colone, Fabiola, Cristallini, Diego, Lombardo, Pierfrancesco
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive control; Clutter; Clutter cancellation; digital video broadcast-terrestrial (DVB-T); Digital Video Broadcasting; displaced phase center antenna (DPCA); Doppler effect; ground moving target indication (GMTI); OFDM; passive coherent location (PCL); Passive radar; Platforms; Radar; Radar antennas; Receiving antennas; Space-time adaptive processing; space-time adaptive processing (STAP); Target detection
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2018.2867688

This paper addresses the problem of clutter cancellation and slowly moving target detection in digital video broadcast-terrestrial-based passive radar systems mounted on moving platforms. First, we show that conventional processing approaches based on the availability of multiple receiving channels might be ineffective in the considered scenarios due to the impossibility to control the employed waveform of opportunity. Therefore, an appropriate space-time adaptive processing scheme is proposed to cope with the Doppler spread clutter returns aiming at ground moving target indication applications. It exploits the benefits of the reciprocal filtering strategy applied at a range compression stage together with a flexible displaced phase center antenna approach. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated via application to a simulated dataset and then tested against experimental data collected by multichannel passive radar on a maritime moving platform.