The processing of airborne multi-channel radar data to cancel the clutter near moving ground targets can be accomplished through Doppler filtering, with displaced phase center antenna (DPCA) techniques, or by space-time adaptive processing (STAP). Typical clutter suppression algorithms recently developed for moving ground targets were designed to function with two-channel displaced phase center radar data. This paper reviews the implementation of a two-channel clutter cancellation approach used in the past (baseline technique), discusses the development of an improved two-channel clutter cancellation algorithm, and extends this technique to three-channel airborne radar data. The enhanced performance of the improved dual channel method is expanded upon by exploiting the extra information gained from a third channel. A significant improvement between the moving target signature level and the surrounding clutter level was obtained with the multi-channel signal subspace (MSS) algorithm when comparing results from dualchannel and three-channel clutter suppression to the baseline two-channel technique.

Date Published: 7 May 2007
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 6568, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XIV, 65680M (7 May 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.718793

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6568:
Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XIV
Edmund G. Zelnio; Frederick D. Garber, Editor(s)