Heterogeneous Clutter Suppression for Airborne Radar STAP Based on Matrix Manifolds

• Main Authors: Xixi Chen, Yongqiang Cheng, Hao Wu, Hongqiang Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: clutter suppression; airborne radar; space-time adaptive processing; matrix manifold
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/16/3195

Clutter suppression in heterogeneous environments is a serious challenge for airborne radar. To address this problem, a matrix-manifold-based clutter suppression method is proposed. First, the distributions of training data in heterogeneous environments are analyzed, while the received data are characterized on a Riemannian manifold of Hermitian positive definite matrices. It is indicated that the training data with different distributions with the same power are separated, whereas data with the same distribution are closer together. This implies that the underlying geometry of the data can be better revealed by manifolds than by Euclidean space. Based on these properties, homogeneous training data are selected by establishing a binary hypothesis test such that the negative effects of the use of heterogeneous samples are alleviated. Moreover, as exploiting a geometric metric on manifolds to reveal the underlying information of data, experimental results on both simulated and real data validate that the proposed method has a superior performance with small sample support.