MIMO Radar Space-Time Adaptive Processing for Multipath Clutter Mitigation

PREFACE. CONTRIBUTORS. 1 MIMO Radar - Diversity Means Superiority (Jian Li and Petre Stoica). 1.1 Introduction. 1.2 Problem Formulation. 1.3 Parameter Identifiability. 1.4 Nonparametric Adaptive Techniques for Parameter Estimation. 1.5 Parametric Techniques for Parameter Estimation. 1.6 Transmit Beampattern Designs. 1.7 Conclusions. Appendix IA Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test. Appendix 1B Lemma and Proof. Acknowledgments. References. 2 MIMO Radar: Concepts, Performance Enhancements, and Applications (Keith W. Forsythe and Daniel W. Bliss). 2.1 Introduction. 2.2 Notation. 2.3 MIMO Radar Virtual Aperture. 2.4 MIMO Radar in Clutter-Free Environments. 2.5 Optimality of MIMO Radar for Detection. 2.6 MIMO Radar with Moving Targets in Clutter: GMTI Radars. 2.7 Summary. Appendix 2A A Localization Principle. Appendix 2B Bounds on R(N). Appendix 2C An Operator Norm Inequality. Appendix 2D Negligible Terms. Appendix 2E Bound on Eigenvalues. Appendix 2F Some Inner Products. Appendix 2G An Invariant Inner Product. Appendix 2H Kronecker and Tensor Products. Acknowledgments. References. 3 Generalized MIMO Radar Ambiguity Functions (Geoffrey San Antonio, Daniel R. Fuhrmann, and Frank C. Robey). 3.1 Introduction. 3.2 Background. 3.3 MIMO Signal Model. 3.4 MIMO Parametric Channel Model. 3.5 MIMO Ambiguity Function. 3.6 Results and Examples. 3.7 Conclusion. References. 4 Performance Bounds and Techniques for Target Localization Using MIMO Radars (Joseph Tabrikian). 4.1 Introduction. 4.2 Problem Formulation. 4.3 Properties. 4.4 Target Localization. 4.5 Performance Lower Bound for Target Localization. 4.6 Simulation Results. 4.7 Discussion and Conclusions. Appendix 4A Log-Likelihood Derivation. Appendix 4B Transmit-Receive Pattern Derivation. Appendix 4C Fisher Information Matrix Derivation. References. 5 Adaptive Signal Design For MIMO Radars (Benjamin Friedlander). 5.1 Introduction. 5.2 Problem Formulation. 5.3 Estimation. 5.4 Detection. 5.5 MIMO Radar and Phased Arrays. Appendix 5A Theoretical SINR Calculation. References. 6 MIMO Radar Spacetime Adaptive Processing and Signal Design (Chun-Yang Chen and P. P. Vaidyanathan). 6.1 Introduction. 6.2 The Virtual Array Concept. 6.3 Spacetime Adaptive Processing in MIMO Radar. 6.4 Clutter Subspace in MIMO Radar. 6.5 New STAP Method for MIMO Radar. 6.6 Numerical Examples. 6.7 Signal Design of the STAP Radar System. 6.8 Conclusions. Acknowledgments. References. 7 Slow-Time MIMO SpaceTime Adaptive Processing (Vito F. Mecca, Dinesh Ramakrishnan, Frank C. Robey, and Jeffrey L. Krolik). 7.1 Introduction. 7.2 SIMO Radar Modeling and Processing. 7.3 Slow-Time MIMO Radar Modeling. 7.4 Slow-Time MIMO Radar Processing. 7.5 OTHr Propagation and Clutter Model. 7.6 Simulations Examples. 7.7 Conclusion. Acknowledgment. References. 8 MIMO as a Distributed Radar System (H. D. Griffiths, C. J. Baker, P. F. Sammartino, and M. Rangaswamy). 8.1 Introduction. 8.2 Systems. 8.3 Performance. 8.4 Conclusions. Acknowledgment. References. 9 Concepts and Applications of A MIMO Radar System with Widely Separated Antennas (Hana Godrich, Alexander M. Haimovich, and Rick S. Blum). 9.1 Background. 9.2 MIMO Radar Concept. 9.3 NonCoherent MIMO Radar Applications. 9.4 Coherent MIMO Radar Applications. 9.5 Chapter Summary. Appendix 9A Deriving the FIM. Appendix 9B Deriving the CRLB on the Location Estimate Error. Appendix 9C MLE of Time Delays - Error Statistics. Appendix 9D Deriving the Lowest GDOP for Special Cases. Acknowledgments. References. 10 SpaceTime Coding for MIMO Radar (Antonio De Maio and Marco Lops). 10.1 Introduction. 10.2 System Model. 10.3 Detection In MIMO Radars. 10.4 Spacetime Code Design. 10.5 The Interplay Between STC and Detection Performance. 10.6 Numerical Results. 10.7 Adaptive Implementation. 10.8 Conclusions. Acknowledgment. References. INDEX.

The range-dependence of clutter spectrum for forward-looking airborne radar strongly affects the accuracy of the estimation of clutter covariance matrix at the range under test, which results in poor clutter suppression performance if the conventional space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithms were applied, especially in the short range cells. Therefore, a new STAP algorithm with clutter spectrum compensation by utilizing knowledge-aided subspace projection is proposed to suppress clutter for forward-looking airborne radar in this paper. In the proposed method, the clutter covariance matrix of the range under test is firstly constructed based on the prior knowledge of antenna array configuration, and then by decomposing the corresponding space-time covariance matrix to calculate the clutter subspace projection matrix which is applied to transform the secondary range samples so that the compensation of clutter spectrum for forward-looking airborne radar is accomplished. After that the conventional STAP algorithm can be applied to suppress clutter in the range under test. The proposed method is compared with the sample matrix inversion (SMI) and the Doppler Warping (DW) methods. The simulation results show that the proposed STAP method can effectively compensate the clutter spectrum and mitigate the range-dependence significantly.

Polarimetric weather radars, such as the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D), improve weather forecasts and provide valuable data for operational and scientific applications. The polarimetric capability adds additional insight into storm microphysics and greatly improves precipitation estimates. Nevertheless, fast-evolving weather events require high-temporal resolution data, which conventional radar systems (mechanical and dish-based) cannot provide. Phased array radar (PAR) offers superior observation capabilities with electronic beam steering and enhanced scanning agility. Furthermore, digital PAR enables 1-D (space and time) processing and overcomes limitations in clutter mitigation compared with the traditional radar systems that only use Doppler processing. Doppler processing is traditionally used to effectively filtering out ground clutter with zero mean velocity. In contrast, space-time processing (STP) enhances clutter mitigation to filter out both stationary and moving clutter through the joint spatial and temporal spectrum. This study aims to apply STP (nonadaptive) and space-time adaptive processing (STAP) to weather radar data and explore their benefits to improve Doppler velocity estimation of meteorological returns. Furthermore, the performance of STP and STAP for different digital PAR back ends, including fully digital and subarray systems, is investigated. Preliminary findings underscore the critical role of radar scanning parameters and environmental conditions, such as sample quantity, clutter-to-signal ratio (CSR), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), in the Doppler velocity estimation. Data collected with the recently completed Horus radar system are evaluated using STP and STAP. Results demonstrate the potential for improving data quality, particularly in Doppler velocity estimation within cluttered environments, through the application of STP and STAP techniques. The filtering algorithm with STAP demonstrates a substantial reduction in error within the Doppler velocity estimation, achieving approximately an eightfold improvement compared with the estimation derived from STP with filtering.

The clutter spectrum depends highly on range for forward-looking radars, which results in heterogeneous ground clutter in space-time adaptive processing (STAP). A new method for the range-dependence of clutter spectrum is proposed. The method firstly obtains a transform matrix by fitting the spatial steering vector of the range gate under test with that of secondary range gate. The transform matrix is then applied to spatial data at a given Doppler gate to compensate clutter spectrum, thus achieving an identical clutter spectrum. The conventional STAP could exploit the compensated data for the clutter suppression. Simulation results show a good improvement in processor performance. (4 pages)

The author addresses the impact of diverse polarisations on clutter statistics in the context of waveform diversity for multi-functional operation from a specific platform as well as for multiple sensing from multiple platforms. A key issue in this context is that of clutter mitigation via the use of diverse waveforms. Classical space–time adaptive processing (STAP) methods for radar target detection can be viewed in the context of a whiten and match filter. To this end, efficient waveforms that lend themselves for such processing are sought. The author specifically considers a statistical analysis of experimental data collected at low grazing angles to validate the fact that vertical transmit–vertical receive (VV) polarised data conform to Rayleigh scatter, whereas horizontal transmit–horizontal receive data do not. Consequently, VV data are suitable for whiten and match processing adopted in conventional radar STAP.

A robust STAP method for airborne radar based on clutter covariance matrix reconstruction and steering vector estimation

Conventional Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) requires large numbers of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) training samples to ensure the clutter suppression performance, which is hard to be achieved in nonhomogeneous environment. In order to obtain improved clutter suppression with small training support, an iterative sparse recovery STAP algorithm is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, the clutter spectrum sparse recovery and the calibration of space-time over-complete dictionary are implemented iteratively, modified focal underdetermined system solution (FOCUSS) with recursive calculation is used to alleviate the recovery error and reduce the computational cost, meanwhile the mismatch of space-time overcomplete dictionary is calibrated by minimized the cost function. Based on the simulated and the actual data, it is verified that the proposed method can not only converge with much smaller training samples compared with conventional STAP methods, but also provide improved performance compared with existing sparsity-based STAP methods.

The nonhomogeneous clutter is one of the biggest challenge for ocean remote sensing radar system such as high frequency hybrid sky-surface wave radar. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is a powerful method to suppress the clutter but the training samples in adjacent range gates are not always independent and identically distributed with the cell under test in the heterogeneous environment. So the estimation of the clutter covariance matrix will be inaccurate and degrade the STAP performance. In this paper, a novel training sample selection method based on information geometric means is proposed to choose the more homogeneous secondary data containing the precise clutter information of cell under test. The simulation results of selection performance is conducted to show the advantages of the Information geometric mean based estimators compared with the existing estimators. Combined with joint domain localized STAP, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental data. The results show the proposed method outperforms conventional STAP method and the nonhomogeneous clutter can be greatly suppressed.

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is an effective tool for moving target detection. Conventional STAP methodologies process the angular and Doppler two dimensional data vector. In practical applications, adjacent range cells are statistically dependent due to filtering, since the point spreading function of a target is not an ideal delta function. In this paper, a novel approach incorporating range (fast time) information in STAP is presented for clutter rejection, which we term space-time-range adaptive processing (STRAP). This method takes advantage of the correlation information of neighboring range cells. Therefore, the stationary clutter can be suppressed better compared with traditional STAP algorithms ignoring fast time information, resulting in more effective moving target detection. The validity of the STRAP algorithm is verified by the experiments of processing the real measured data of the three-channel X-band radar and MCARM radar systems.

Linear prediction of range-dependent inverse covariance matrix (PICM) sequences

In this paper, we study the problem of detecting slow-moving targets using space-time adaptive processing (STAP). The construction of the optimum weights at each range implies the estimation of the interference-plus-noise covariance matrix. This is typically done by straight averaging of snapshots at neighboring ranges. However, in most bistatic configurations, snapshot statistics are range dependent. Straight averaging results thus in poor performance. This paper proposes a new method of obtaining an estimate of the covariance matrix using power spectrum registration based on nonuniform frequency sampling technique. Simulation results show a significant improvement in processor performance as compared to conventional STAP methods.

It was recently shown that MIMO radars with sparse sensing and matrix completion (MC) can significantly reduce the volume of data required by MIMO radars for accurate target detection and estimation. In MIMO-MC radars, the subsampled target returns are forwarded by the receive antennas to a fusion center, partially filling a matrix, referred to as the data matrix. The data matrix is first completed via MC techniques and then used to estimate the target parameters via standard array processing methods. This paper studies the applicability of MC theory on the data matrix arising in colocated MIMO radars using uniform linear arrays. It is shown that the data matrix coherence, and consequently the performance of MC, is directly related to the transmit waveforms. Among orthogonal waveforms, the optimum choices are those for which, any snapshot across the transmit array has a flat spectrum. The problem of waveform design is formulated as an optimization problem on the complex Stiefel manifold, and is solved via the modified steepest descent method, or the modified Newton algorithm with nonmonotone line search. Although the optimal waveforms are designed for the case of targets falling in the same range bin, sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the performance degradation when those waveforms are used in scenarios in which the targets fall in different range bins.

A novel application of time-modulated arrays to multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar is presented and studied. The proposed scheme is to partition the transmit antenna of MIMO radar to a number of time-modulated subarrays that are overlapped. A series of orthogonal waveforms are emitted by these time-modulated subarrays with the unidirectional phase center motion time scheme. The resulting system can be referred to as subarrayed time-modulated MIMO (STM-MIMO) radar. As the tradeoff of conventional phased-array and MIMO radars, the STM-MIMO radar can obtain the coherent processing gain and waveform diversity gain simultaneously. The performance in terms of output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and transmit/receive beampattern for the STM-MIMO radar is highlighted and compared to that of phased-array and MIMO radars. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed STM-MIMO radar technique.

In order to quantitatively evaluate the influence of the aberration of the antenna radiation pattern of airborne radar on clutter feature, the range-azimuth two dimensional (2D) model of the airborne radar clutter is established. Then the theoretic modelling and simulation analysis are proposed in three aspects, including the Doppler, power spectrum and space-time 2D characteristics of the clutter. Finally, the processing of moving target indication, pulse Doppler and space-time adaptive processing are used to suppress the clutter of the echo signals before and after the aberration. The results of the simulations indicate the aberration would elevate the sidelobe level, extend the power spectrum and bend the space-time trajectory of the clutter Doppler spectra. And the residual clutter would be elevated nearly 5 dB after STAP processing. Then the pattern preserving and fast time cancel combined space-time adaptive processing method is proposed, which can obtain narrow clutter notch and large improvement factor, and effectively suppress clutter. The modelling and quantitative analysis study have important theoretical and engineering significance for the detection capability of the airborne radar installed on the fuselage of the aircraft platform, the tactical and technical performance index, and improving the signal processing ability of airborne radar.

This paper describes signal-processing aspects associated with a distributed aperture spaceborne sensor (DASS). DASS offers a number of advantages over a monolithic system. The cost is a more complex signal processing architecture. This paper describes the SINR losses associated with both a single waveform transmitted simultaneously from all satellites and the SINR losses associated with transmitting orthogonal waveforms from each of the satellites. The losses associated with the presence of real-world effects, such as phase errors, are included for both cases. Simulation results are given describing the loss characteristics of a DASS. It is shown herein that a two-dimensiona l DASS using joint domain optimum space-time adaptive processing (STAP) suffers high estimation losses due to a strong antenna taper in elevation. We demonstrate that reduced rank STAP methods substantially reduce this loss.