Exclusion of Target Signals from Training Samples for Robust Adaptive Beamforming in Radar

A technique for excluding the target signal from contaminated training samples is proposed for robust adaptive beamforming (ABF) in radar. We focus on applying the proposed technique to mitigate the effect of ionospheric clutter in high-frequency surface-wave radar systems, but the technique can also be applied to overcome jamming signals without the need to allocate dedicated listening intervals. A computer simulation indicates that the proposed technique for effectively excluding the target signal is successful; the subsequent ABF achieves asymptotically the same signal to interference-plus-noise ratio where target contamination in the training samples is absent.