Adaptive radar clutter suppression

Abstract

The clutter return presents a severe problem in target detection for radar systems. Conventional radar systems assume the clutter is stationary, with energy concentrated in the low frequency domain. To minimize the effect of clutter, radar systems use a fixed high pass filter (HPF) to eliminate the clutter. When the target Doppler frequency is below the cutoff frequency of the high pass filter, or the clutter energy does not concentrate on the low frequency domain, the performance of radar system is severely degraded. This paper proposes an adaptive clutter suppression scheme. This scheme provides more efficient clutter suppression for non-stationary clutter and provides the ability to detect a slow moving target. The computer simulation is presented to compare the performance of this adaptive clutter suppression technique and the fixed clutter suppression filter.