一种利用双先验知识的稳健STAP算法
A Robust STAP Algorithm Using Two Prior Knowledge
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摘要: 空时自适应信号处理(Space-Time Adaptive Processing, STAP)技术在空域和时域上联合地自适应抑制杂波,以实现对动目标检测。稀疏恢复空时自适应处理方法(Sparse Recovery STAP, SR-STAP)由于利用了杂波谱的稀疏性先验知识,可以缓解在机载雷达在非均匀环境下训练数据不足时,杂波抑制效果性能显著下降的问题。尽管SR-STAP只需要少量样本即可恢复出杂波谱并重构杂波协方差矩阵(Clutter Covariance Matrix, CCM),其重构性能仍然受到训练样本数量的制约,当增加训练样本数量时,杂波谱恢复精度具有进一步提升的潜力。另一方面,当机载雷达的接收阵列为等间隔均匀线阵并且系统在一个相干处理间隔中脉冲重复频率恒定时,CCM可具有斜对称特性。该先验知识若被充分利用,可以将等效训练样本数量扩展为原来的两倍。本文将CCM的斜对称特性结合入SR-STAP的框架中,提出了一种稳健的SR-STAP算法,该算法同时利用CCM的斜对称特性和杂波谱稀疏性两种先验知识,能够在相同训练样本量下进一步提升杂波谱的恢复精度和CCM的估计精度。算法首先利用斜对称变换矩阵对从待检测单元中的数据和训练样本进行预处理,将等效训练样本数量扩展至原来的两倍;随后结合预处理后训练样本和一种协方差稀疏迭代算法,实现对CCM的准确重构并设计相应STAP滤波器。算法无需设置超参数,实际应用中易于操作。仿真结果表明,新算法能够有效提升杂波谱恢复的准确度,具有较好的杂波抑制性能。Abstract: The Space-Time Adaptive Signal Processing technique adaptively suppresses the clutter in the joint space-time domain to realize the detection of moving target detection. Sparse Recovery based STAP (SR-STAP) exploits the sparsity of the clutter spectrum, which can effectively alleviate the performance degradation when the number of training data is insufficient in heterogeneous environment. Although SR-STAP only requires a small number of samples to recover the clutter spectrum and reconstruct the Clutter Covariance Matrix (CCM), the clutter spectrum recovery accuracy has the potential to be further improved when the number of samples is increased. On the other hand, when the radar receiver consists of the uniformly spaced linear array and the repetition frequency of transmitted pulses is constant in a coherent processing interval, the CCM has the structure of persymmetric. If this prior knowledge is fully utilized, the number of equivalent training samples will be doubled. In this paper, by combining the persymmetric property of CCM into the framework of SR-STAP, we proposed a novel robust SR-STAP algorithm. The proposed algorithm could further improve the estimation accuracy of CCM and the reconstruction accuracy of clutter spectrum under the same number of training data by exploiting the two prior knowledge including the persymmetric property of CCM and the sparsity of clutter spectrum. Firstly, we preprocessed the data in the cell under test and training data by introducing the persymmetry transformation matrix to increase the number of equivalent training data as twice as the original. Then, the CCM was reconstructed and the corresponding STAP filter is devised by combining the preprocessed training data and a sparse iterative covariance-based estimation algorithm. The proposed algorithm did not require any hyperparameter, which made it is easy for operating in practical applications. Finally, numerical examples showed that the proposed algorithm could significantly improve the clutter spectrum recovery accuracy and outperforms its competitor in terms of clutter suppression performance.