A Novel Method to Extract Moving Targets in the Wide-Area Surveillance Airborne SAR/GMTI System

Abstract:
Since in the multichannel radar systems, each channel observes the same scene at the same time, if we compensate the phase differences caused by channel spacings along all channels and stack each of the channel data as one column vector of a new matrix, then this new matrix can be considered as the sum of three matrixes: low-rank matrix of the ground clutter, sparse matrix of the moving targets, and small entry-wise matrix of the noise component. Therefore, the newly proposed PCP method can be used to extract the information of moving targets from the radar echoes. Simulation results processed by our proposed algorithm are presented and compared with the processing results via a reduced-dimension space-time adaptive processing (STAP) method named “factored STAP”. The comparison between the proposed approach and factored STAP shows the better performance in suppressing clutter in the nonhomogeneous environment.