Abstract: The location of the ground clutter in angle-Doppler space is mainly dependent on the platform movement and phased array airborne radar parameters. In this paper, we propose a pre-filtering approach by using a two-dimensional (2-D) pulse-to-pulse non-adaptive canceller which makes full use of such a-priori information. The 2-D pulse-to-pulse non-adaptive canceller is more easily designed and does not require significant additional processing. Therefore, it can be used as an efficient pre-filtering tool before the conventional MTI processing and the adaptive processing. Theoretical analysis and computer simulation results illustrate that the proposed pre-filtering approach can effectively suppress the clutter not only for the sidelooking airborne radar but also for the non-sidelooking airborne radar, and can further improve the moving target detection performance. Experimental results by using the measured data show the validity of the proposed pre-filtering approach.

Key words: phased array airborne radar, clutter suppression, space-time adaptive processing (STAP), pre-filtering