An Advanced Signal Processor Design for Clutter Suppression

With advances in modern radar hardware technology, large instantaneous bandwidths, and even larger frequency-agility bandwidths, are now becoming commonplace. When faced with the standard problem of target detection in highly cluttered environments,conventional range-Doppler signal processing techniques have directly benefited from the improvements in instantaneous bandwidths, but have not been designed to capitalize on gains in frequency agility bandwidths. The objective of this Phase I proposal isto develop and demonstrate a proof-of-principal design for effectively integrating this third dimension into existing range-Doppler designs for clutter suppression. With such a 3-dimensional filter design, clutter suppression improvments are expectedwhenever the frequency agility bandwidth of the radar exceeds the coherence bandwidth of the clutter, which fortuitously is the most commonplace situation. Essentially all military and commercial radar systems would benifit from a more effective solutionto the cluttered target detection problem.