Clutter suppression for airborne phased radar with conformal arrays by least squares estimation

The radar clutter statistics for airborne conformal arrays varies by range, i.e., the clutter distributions are nonstationary, which causes performance degradation for the conventional space-time adaptive processing (STAP), which estimates the clutter covariance matrix (CCM) from data at adjacent range cells. In this paper, a novel clutter suppression method for airborne phased radar with conformal arrays is proposed that takes a form of corrected sample matrix inversion (SMI) through the CCM estimated by the least squares (LS) estimation. The estimated CCM can provide partial information about the real CCM in the novel method, which results in improved detection performance for targets in conformal array applications. Simulation results relative to several typical conformal arrays verify the effectivity of the presented method.