Clutter suppression and moving target imaging approach for multichannel hypersonic vehicle borne radar

Abstract In this paper, a clutter suppression and ground moving target imaging algorithm is proposed for the hypersonic vehicle (HSV) borne multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. Different from the traditional horizontal flight radar platforms, the HSV-borne radar platform is with a complex movement, and typically has a skipping trajectory. Therefore, the clutter suppression and imaging operations are difficult to implement. To deal with this problem, a descending stage signal model of multichannel SAR system is presented and studied for the HSV-borne radar. Then, the clutter and moving target echoes are transformed into the azimuth frequency domain. Considering that there exists a phase difference between clutter and the moving target, the clutter suppression approach is implemented with a series of spatial domain filters. After that, the moving target is focused based on the keystone transform. In addition, the performance analyses and related issues of the proposed method are presented. Finally, some simulation experiments are taken to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.