Performance improvement for monostatic clutter mitigation using space–time–range three-dimensional adaptive processing

Fast time (range delay time) information has been well exploited for the terrain scattered interference or hot clutter mitigation. In this paper, an approach incorporating fast time in space–time adaptive processing (STAP) is introduced for monostatic (cold) clutter rejection. This method takes advantage of the coherence information of adjacent range bins. Compared to traditional STAP algorithms, the performance of monostatic clutter mitigation can be improved due to the fact that the additional range degree of freedom (DoF) can mitigate various deleterious factors in realistic scenarios which may increase the DoFs of clutter patches. Results of real measured data processing using airborne X-band and MCARM radar systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed processor.