A Clutter Suppression Method Based on Angle-Doppler Compensation for

Airborne Radar with Uniform Circular Arrays Antennas

Zhao Jun
1
, Zhao Jianyang
2
, Xu Hang
2
(1.The First Aeronautic Institute of Air Force, Xinyang, 464000,China
2.Huaiyin Institute of Technology,Huaian,223003,China)
happyzj112@163.com


Abstract-The clutter distribution of airborne radar with
uniform circular array antennas varies with ranges and
received data in different range gates are not independent
identically distributed vectors, so the statistical STAP methods
degrade. In this paper, based on the detailed analysis of clutter
distribution for airborne radar with uniform circular array
antennas, the conclusion that the non-linear relation between
space angle and number of arrays results in the nohomogeneity
at range for airborne radar with circular array antennas is
gained. A clutter suppression method for airborne radar with
uniform circular array antennas is proposed in this paper.
This method involves in a preprocessing with MADC method
to align the centers of clutter spectrum in different range gates
and subsequently clutter suppression in other azimuths with
DBU technology. Simulation results show the validity of this
method.

Keywords-uniform circular array; airborne radarclutter
suppression; angle-Doppler compensation; space-time adaptive
processing
I. Introduction
Airborne early warning radars with uniform circular array
antennas have advantages such as all-orientation space
scanning, flexible search and trace mode and good beam
bearing when the mainlobe derivate the normal of the array.
Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) techniques are
very effective methods for clutter cancellation and target
detection in airborne radars. However, the premise of STAP
approaches is to have sufficient training samples with
interference which are independent identical distributed
(IID) with interference in cell under test (CUT) to estimate
the covariance matrix. But in the circular application,
training samples in range cells are no longer IID vectors and
the statistical STAP methods degrade dramatically
1-4
.

II. Signal model and problem description
Consider a pulse Doppler radar consists of circular phased
array situated on an airborne platform, which is moving at a
constant velocity of v, as shown in figure 1. The circular
array consists of a total of P elements equally distributed in
azimuth angle and N adjacent of the P antennas are used to
transmit and receive at any one time, so the azimuth angle of
the th n element 1, 2, , n N " is given by
( ) 1
2
n
n
P
r
-
(1)
X
Y
Z

v
0

Fig. 1 Geometry of Airborne Radar with Uniform Circular Array
The airborne radar transmits a burst of K pulses in a
coherent process interval. The NK received signals for a
given range cell can be expressed as a 1 NK vector
5-6

[ ]
T
(1,1) ( ,1) (1, ) ( , ) x x N x K x N K " ! " X (2)
In the presence of a target with elevation angle 0 and
azimuth angle , the snapshot of CUT can be written as
o - - X S C N (3)
Where C and N denote clutter and noise component
respectively and S is the target space-time steering vector
which can be expressed as
t s
S S S (4)
where
( )
T
4 4
1 exp cos cos exp 1 cos cos
t
r r
v v
j j K
f f
r r
0 0
/ /

-


" S
is
an 1 K temporal steering vector which is a function of radar
wavelength / and pulse repetition frequency
r
f .
( ) ( ) ( )
T
1, 2, ,
exp exp exp
s s UCA s UCA sN UCA
j j j c c c

S " is an
1 K spatial steering vector where
( )
,
2 cos cos
sn UCA n
R
c r 0
/
- is the inter-element phase shift
and R denotes the radius of the circular array.
To make the linear adaptive, 2L target-free echo vectors
from range cells adjacent to CUT are collected and thus the
estimated interference covariance matrix of the CUT can be
obtained as
2010 2nd International Conference on Signal Processing Systems (ICSPS)
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H
, 0
1

2
L
l l
i L i
L
-

R X X (4)
where ( ) , , 1,1, ,
l
l L L - - " " X is the secondary
data(training samples) for the th l range cell. The optimum
weight vector that produces the maximum signal to clutter
and noise can be estimated using
1

-
W R S (5)
where
H

S RS . The way of estimate weight vector of

STAP are called Sample Matrix Inversion(SMI)
7
method.
Figure 2 shows the signal to clutter and noise ratio loss
(SCNR Loss) comparison for CUT in 10km, 50km, 100km
and 400km respectively between uniform circular array and
uniform linear array with 2NK training samples which are
chosen symmetrically near the CUT.
-1 0 1
-70
-60
-50
-40
-30
-20
-10
0

(d
B
)
I
G
I
U

10 km
50 km
100 km
400 km
-1 0 1
-70
-60
-50
-40
-30
-20
-10
0

(d
B
)
2f
d
/f
r

10 km
50 km
100 km
400 km

(a) Uniform Circular Array (b) Uniform Linear Array
Fig. 2 Comparison of SCNR Loss
As shown in figure2, SCNR loss of UCA decreases
dramatically at near ranges and trend to stabilize at far ranges
while SCNR loss of ULA is about the same at any range.
Since STAP training samples are taken from range cells near
CUT, the fluctuation of SCNR loss in different range
indicates the clutter of UCA array are range-dependency and
training data in the vicinity of CUT are no longer IID
samples. Since the premise of STAP is to have ample training
samples with interference that are IID with interference in
CUT, under this condition, conventional statistical STAP
methods degrade greatly.
As the temple steering vector of ULA is the same as UCA
and the spatial steering of ULA is
( ) ( ) ( )
T
1, 2, ,
exp exp exp
s s ULA s ULA sN ULA
j j j c c c

" S where
( )
,
2 1 cos cos
sn ULA
d
n c r 0
/
- ,where d is the inter-element space,
the relation between space angle
, sn ULA
c and number of
element n is linear while ( )
,
2 cos cos
sn UCA n
R
c r 0
/
- , so the
non-linear relations between space angle and number of
element result in the clutter nonhomogerity of UCA.

III. STAP method for UCA

A. Processing of MACD
To obtain a good estimation of the covariance matrix of
CUT using the secondary data from adjacent range cells, the
clutter spectrum centers of different range cell should be
aligned or as close to each other as possible. Since the
clutter spectrum centers, which locate at the main beam
center of the transmitter antenna, are defined as the peak
position of the clutter spectrum for a specified isorange
contour, compared with other directions, clutter spectrum in
different range cells be co-located in main beam center will
reduce the clutter dispersion of UCA furthest
8-10
.
The doppler frequency difference between the clutter
spectrum center of the th l ( ) , , 1,1, , l L L - - " " secondary
range cell and the 0th range cell (CUT) is
, , ,0 d l d l d
f f f A - (6)
and space angle difference is
, , ,0 sn l sn l sn
c c c A - (7)
where
, d l
f is the Doppler frequency and
, sn l
c is the space
angle of the clutter spectrum center in the th l training
sample, the transformation matrix of MADC can be
generated in the following manner
, ,
( ) ( )
t l s l
diag diag T T T (8)
where ( ) diag < denotes diagonalizing a vector,
, , ,
1 exp( 2 / ) exp( 2 ( 1) / )
t l d l r d l r
j f f j K f f r r

A - A

T "

, 1, 2, ,
exp( ) exp( ) exp( )
s l s l s l sN l
j j j c c c

A A A

T " and
denotes Kroncker product. The th l secondary data
with MACD method is then
' H
l l
X T X (9)
After preprocessing with MADC algorithm, the clutter
spectrum centers at each secondary range cells are
collocated and the clutter in the center of main beam are
homogeneous, but in the direction of the sidelobe, there is
still large clutter dispersion. In order to further reduce the
clutter range-dependency of UCA, DBU
11-12
method is
then adopted.

B. DBU method

Since the training samples after the processing of MADC
are still range-dependency and the weight vector of STAP is
related to the secondary data, so it is supposed the optimum
weight vector W for STAP is a function of range cell l and
may be expanded as power series
( ) (0) (0) l l - W W W
<
(10)
Here the term in
2
l and the subsequent terms are assumed to
be small enough to be ignored.
The output of the th l secondary range cell is then
2010 2nd International Conference on Signal Processing Systems (ICSPS)
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H ' H ' '
( ) ( ) ( ) (0) ( ) (0) ( ) Y l l l l l l - W X W X W X
<
(11)
By forming a 2 1 NK vector ( ) 0 W , equation (11) can be
rewritten as
( )
H
( ) 0 ( ) Y l l W X (12)
where ( )
T
0 (0) (0)

W W W
<
is the extended weight vector
and
( )
T
' '
( ) ( ) ( ) l l l l X X X is an extended second data .
In the homogeneous environment, all the data from range
cells are IID samples and the optimum weight vector should
be the same. From equation (12), by extending
'
( ) l X to ( ) l X , the corresponding vector ( )
H
0 W does no
longer depend on range cell l and the nonhomogeneity of
UCA is alleviated.
The extended covariance matrix can be estimated as
H
, 0
( ) ( )
L
r L r
r r
-

R X X (13)
where
( )
T
' '
( ) ( ) ( ) r r r r X X X is the extended vector and
is a scaling factor which satisfies
2 2
, 0
1
1
2
r L
r L r
r
L

(14)
We name this two stage hybrid method which cascades
processing with MADC algorithm and subsequent DBU
technology as MADC-DBU method.

IV. Simulation Results

Table I Parameters of simulation
Radar platform velocity
130 / v m s
Radar platform height
8000 m H
Frequency
0
1.3 GHz f
Number of pulses
8 k
Bandwidth
1 MHz B
Pulse repetition frequency
2260 Hz
r
f
Total number of UCA
24 P
Number used for working
8 N
Radius of UCA
1.92 R /
Azimuth of transmitter
90
D
D

Clutter to noise ratio
50 dB CNR

Simulation parameters are given in Table I, the CUT is
assumed to lie in 21.5
s
R km . A reduced dimension
method, namely 3DT-SAP algorithm
9
, is used to reduce
the dimension of training data which have been processed
with MADC-DBU method, so 96 range cells adjacent to the
CUT are used covariance matrix estimation. The Improved
Factor
[6]
(IF) comparison of OPT (covariance matrix
known), MADC-DBU, MADC and SMI are given in figure
3 and Minimum Variance (MV) power spectrum
6
comparison are given in figure 4.
-1 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
2f
d
/f
r
I
F
/
d
B
OPT
MADC-DBU
ADC
SMI

Fig.3 Comparison of IF

2fd/fr
c
o
s

MADC-DBU
-1 -0.5 0 0.5 1
-1
-0.8
-0.6
-0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9

(a) OPT (b) MADC-DBU

(c) MADC (d) SMI
Fig.4 Comparison of MV Power Spectrum

Figure 3 shows the IF with both of the compensation
methods, MADC-DBU and MADC, can allow a much
improvement with respect to IF without compensation. As
apparent, MADC-DBU demonstrates a further improvement
with respect to MADC because the latter only reduce the
clutter dispersion in the spectrum center while the former
dose not only in the mainlobe of transmitter but also in the
sidelobe. This fact is conformed in Figure 4. The MV power
spectrum obtained on secondary data preprocessing with
MADC-DBU is significantly narrower with respect to that
preprocessing with MADC.

V. Conclusion

The clutter of airborne radar with UCA is range-
dependency and data from range cells near the CUT are not
independent identical distributed samples, so the statistical
STAP methods degrade heavily. In this paper, a hybrid
STAP method which cascades the pre-processing with
MADC and subsequent DBU is proposed. Simulation
2010 2nd International Conference on Signal Processing Systems (ICSPS)
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results show the proposed method can effectively alleviate
the nonhomogeneity of clutter for UCA and performs better
than traditional MADC method.

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