Joint STAP-ISAR for non-cooperative target imaging in strong clutter

Abstract

The aim of this work is to combine clutter suppression and ISAR processing in order to obtain well focused images of extended moving targets. A STAP ISAR based moving target imaging scheme for Multichannel SAR (M-SAR) in strong clutter environment is presented. This scheme consists of two main processing steps. The first step performs clutter mitigation and radar motion compensation by exploiting Space Time Adaptive Processing while the second step performs target motion compensation using ISAR processing. Two principal issues will be addressed. First a technique for applying ISAR processing after clutter mitigation is presented and then a suboptimal approach to clutter mitigation is proposed to overcome computational and statistical issues associated with estimation of clutter space time covariance matrix. Results of the processing applied to simulated data are provided in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.