New Solutions to the Problem of Range Dependence in Bistatic STAP Radars

peer reviewedWe address the problem of detecting slow-moving targets using a space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radar. The construction of optimum weights at each range implies the estimation of the clutter covariance matrix. This is typically done by straight averaging of neighboring data snapshots. However, in bistatic configurations, these snapshots are rangedependent. As a result, straight averaging results in poor performance. After reviewing existing methods for handling the range-dependence, we present new methods exploiting the precise shape of the bistatic direction-Doppler curves