Non‐stationary clutter suppression method for bistatic airborne radar based on adaptive segmentation and space–time compensation

Bistatic airborne radar has excellent performance due to the separate transmitter and receiver, but its clutter distribution is usually non‐stationary, which causes the performance of the traditional Space time adaptive processing (STAP) method to fail. Herein, firstly a bistatic airborne radar clutter signal model established, followed by an analysis of its clutter distribution characteristics in detail, and finally a bistatic airborne radar space–time compensation STAP method based on adaptive segmentation is proposed. The method first uses the distribution characteristics of the peak spectral centre in the first pulse data of the airborne radar to adaptively segment the clutter data, including extremely non‐stationary, severely non‐stationary, and non‐stationary clutter regions. Then the clutter data are compensated based on the estimation value of the space–time peak spectrum centre. Finally, each range section is processed by using STAP, and the detected target Doppler frequency is adaptively moved. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.