STAP-Based Airborne Radar System for Maneuvering Target Detection

Abstract

With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), techniques are required for the detection and surveillance of such UAVs for both civil and military purposes. This paper addresses the maneuvering target detection with an airborne radar system based on a space-time adaptive processing (STAP) technique. A general signal model is established for the moving target, where the target is parameterized with angle, velocity, acceleration, and backscattering coefficient. A general adaptive matched filtering method is proposed involving multiple-dimensional search. An enhanced approach is devised by using a discrete searching technique within the acceleration dimension in order to reduce the computational complexity. The simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• Airborne radar system
• space-time adaptive processing
• unmanned aerial vehicle
• multiple-dimensional search
• discrete searching technique
• discrete step size