Fast reduced-rank STAP algorithm based on Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation for airborne radar

In the reduced-rank space-time adaptive processing (STAP) methods, especially the principal component (PC) analysis STAP method, a set of dominant eigenvectors must be obtained by singular value decomposition of the space-time covariance matrix. Therefore, it is very difficult to be applied in practical system due to the intense computational complexity. In order to reduce the computational burden, a fast reduced-rank STAP algorithm based on Gram-Schmidt (GS) orthogonalisation is proposed in this article. In the proposed GS-PC STAP method, the clutter subspace is reconstructed by the GS orthogonalisation of training samples. Then, the STAP adaptive weight vector is calculated by orthogonally projecting the quiescent weight vector into clutter subspace, which can hold fast convergence measure of effectiveness (MOE) and require less computational complexity by compared with the conventional PC method. Based on the simulated data and multichannel airborne radar measurements data, the corresponding convergence MOE and the clutter suppression performances are verified in the article.