A Subspace Method for MIMO Radar Space-Time Adaptive Processing

Abstract

In the traditional transmitting beamforming radar system, the transmitting antennas send coherent waveforms which form a highly focused beam. In the MIMO radar system, the transmitter sends noncoherent (possibly orthogonal) broad (possibly omnidirectional) waveforms. These waveforms can be extracted by a matched interbank. The extracted signals can be used to obtain more diversity or improve the clutter resolution. In this paper, we focus on space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for MIMO radar systems which improves the clutter resolution. With a slight modification, STAP methods for the SIMO radar case can also be used in MIMO radar. However, in the MIMO radar, the rank of the jammer-and-clutter subspace becomes very large, especially the jammer subspace. It affects both the complexity and the convergence of the STAP. In this paper, a new subspace method is proposed. It computes the clutter subspace using the geometry of the problem rather than data and utilizes the block diagonal property of the jammer covariance matrix. Because of fully utilizing the geometry and the structure of the covariance matrix, the method is very effective for STAP in MIMO radar.

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