Registration based compensation method based on adaptive subspace tracking

The registration based compensation (RBC) method is an effective method to compensate the range-dependence of the main-lobe clutter and side-lobe clutter in the same time. However, the compensation performance of the RBC degrades because of the mismatch of prior information and the loss of degree of system freedom. Moreover, the RBC is not very suited for real-time implementation because of the enormous computational complexity and memory usage of eigenvalue decomposition. In this paper, a novel clutter range-dependence compensation method using the modified maximum likelihood adaptive subspace estimation algorithm, which is named the MRBC method for short, is proposed. The eigenvectors matrix and eigenvalues matrix of the clutter covariance matrix are estimated by iterative tracking instead of temporal and spatial smoothing, spectrum calculation and eigenvalue decomposition. Compared with the traditional RBC method, the proposed method can reduce the computational complexity significantly and maintain the performance of clutter range-dependence compensation. In addition, the proposed method can also achieve good performance when the system error exists because of no use of prior information. Experimental simulations demonstrate the validity of this method.