Doppler Compensation in Airborne Forward-Looking Radar for Ground Short Range Clutter

In the ground short range target detection of airborne forward-looking arrays, the clutter Doppler frequency highly depends on range. A Doppler compensation method based on vector similarity criteria is proposed, which can estimate the compensation values from the received clutter data. The Doppler compensation, as a pre-processing of space time adaptive processing (STAP) corresponding to clutter data of various range bins, can be utilized for efficient solution of the ground short range clutter nonhomogeneous problem. The method in the pulse domain has the same impact as in Doppler domain and is suitable for parallel implementation; moreover, it has the advantage of low complexity. The simulation shows that a high performance improvement factor can be obtained when it is applied to the pre-processing of STAP.