Clutter suppression and moving target detection and feature extraction for airborne high range resolution phased array radar

We study the moving target detection and feature extraction in the presence of ground clutter for airborne sigh Range Resolution (HRR) phased array radar. To avoid the range migration problems that occur in HRR radar data, we first divide the HRR range profiles into Low Range Resolution (LRR) segments. Since each LRR segment contains a sequence of HRR range bins, no information is lost due to the division and hence no loss of resolution occurs. We show how to use a Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) filtering technique to suppress the ground clutter. Then we show how to estimate the target parameters of interest, including the target Doppler frequency, Direction-of-arrival (DOA), and complex amplitude and range frequency of each target scatterer. A moving target detector based on a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) detection strategy is also derived. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms.