A General Framework for Slow and Weak Range-Spread Ground Moving Target Indication Using Airborne Multichannel High-Resolution Radar

Airborne multichannel high-resolution radar (HRR)-ground moving target indication (GMTI) is of great significance to wide-area surveillance, traffic monitoring, and target recognition. The Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, produced an advanced airborne digital array radar with high resolution and conducted an experiment with slow and weak cooperative moving targets in 2021. In this article, an overall processing framework for target detection, parameter estimation, and target tracking using this system is introduced. For HRR detection, the echo energy of targets is spread into multiple range units, so-called range-spread targets; thus, using detectors designed for pointlike targets will severely degrade the detection performance, especially for slow and weak targets. To address the adaptive detection of such range-spread targets embedded in Gaussian clutter with an unknown covariance matrix, a novel two-step generalized space-time adaptive processing (GSTAP) algorithm is proposed, which offers an enhanced clutter suppression capability compared with natural competitors. Moreover, a tracking method is implemented in the range-Doppler domain to avoid track loss caused by azimuth relocation error and reject discrete false alarms. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and provide a paradigm for further research.