Bistatic forward-looking SAR moving target detection method based on joint clutter cancellation in echo-image domain with three receiving channels

In bistatic forward-looking synthetic aperture radar (BFSAR) ground moving target detection (GMTD), the suppression of the strong and heterogeneous ground clutter is one of the most crucial and challenging issues. Due to the bistatic forward-looking mode and long observation time, Doppler ambiguity, range and Doppler cells migration and non-stationary characteristics will exist in clutter receives, which leads to severe performance degradation of the traditional method. Hence, this paper proposes a GMTD method based on joint clutter cancellation in echo-image domain for BFSAR to achieve effective GMTD in heterogeneous BFSAR clutter. First, the pre-filtering and keystone transform are applied to suppress Doppler ambiguity and correct range cell migration, respectively. Then, time-division space-time adaptive clutter cancellation is adopted to suppress clutter at the first time in the echo domain, which can eliminate the effect of the migration of Doppler cells. However, its performance will be severely degraded due to the strong non-stationary characteristic of BFSAR clutter. Finally, adaptive displaced phase center antenna is exploited to suppress the residual non-stationary BFSAR clutter in image domain. Experimental results have shown that the strong non-stationary clutter of BFSAR has been sufficiently suppressed by the proposed method and the SCNR provided is enough to detect a moving target well.