Optimally Matched Space-Time Filtering Technique for BFSAR Nonstationary Clutter Suppression

Clutter suppression in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is one of the urgent and attractive problems in ground moving target indication (GMTI) application. With separate transmitter and receiver, ground clutter is nonstationary in bistatic forward-looking SAR (BFSAR), which directly leads to the inaccurate clutter covariance matrix (CCM) estimation. As a consequence, the traditional space-time adaptive processing (STAP) will suffer from a serious performance deterioration. In this article, an optimally matched space-time filtering (MSTF) technique is proposed to suppress nonstationary clutter for BFSAR systems. The main idea of the proposed method is to directly design and generate a suppression filter in space-time domain, whose space-time frequency response is matched with clutter spectrum. To construct the matched space-time filter, clutter modeling with arbitrary BFSAR configuration is first proposed to acquire space-time information of clutter spectrum. And then, the suppression filter can be designed and the design process is transferred into a constrained optimization problem (COP), according to the obtained clutter space-time information. Finally, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to solve the COP and obtain the optimal solution, i.e., the desired matched space-time filter weight, for BFSAR nonstationary clutter suppression. Since the generation of the designed filter circumvents CCM estimation, the proposed method will not be affected by the nonstationary characteristic of BFSAR clutter. In October 2020, the first airborne BFSAR-GMTI experiment in the world has been successfully conducted by us, and the experimental results are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.