Research on Polarization Cancellation of Nonstationary Ionosphere Clutter in HF Radar System

Abstract

Oblique projection polarization filter (OPPF) can be applied as an effective approach for interference cancellation in high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) and other systems. In order to suppress the nonstationary ionosphere clutter further, a novel OPPF based clutter suppressing scheme is proposed in this paper. The polarization and nonstationary characteristic of the clutter are taken into account in the algorithms referred to as range-Doppler domain polarization suppression (RDDPS) and the range-time domain polarization suppression (RTDPS) method, respectively. The RDDPS is designed for weak ionosphere clutter and implemented in the range-Doppler domain directly, whereas the RTDPS algorithm is designed to suppress the powerful ionosphere clutter with a multisegment estimation and suppression scheme. About 15–23 dB signal to interference ratio (SIR) improvement can be excepted when using the proposed method, whereas the targets can be more easily detected in the range-Doppler map. Experimental results demonstrate that the scheme proposed is effective for nonstationary ionosphere clutter and is proven to be a practical interference cancellation technique for HFSWR.