MIMO radar clutter mitigation based on joint beamforming and joint domain localized processing

In this article, we propose a space–time adaptive processing scheme via a generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC) architecture for airborne multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. This scheme employs the waveforms extracted by the matched filter bank that is cascaded at the receive end and utilizes digital beamforming technique to synthesize a certain number of transmit–receive beams, therefore, the operation of target detection in clutter environment can be conducted in all the directions of the formed beams in parallel. The GSC architecture is derived to implement adaptive reduced-rank (RR) clutter mitigation in a localized angle-Doppler space based on a novel RR multistage Wiener filter algorithm. The number of iterative stages in this algorithm is automatically selected in terms of a rank decision methodology. Meanwhile, beamforming and beam selecting methods are provided for this scheme, aiming at adaptively suppressing the clutter in localized domain. This scheme reverses the unavailability of the PA-efficient joint domain localized algorithm for MIMO radar. Moreover, it adapts to MIMO radar with arbitrary transmit–receive array space ratio. Even better, the proposed scheme has lower computation complexity than the traditional sample matrix inversion algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provide a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio improvement than traditional algorithms.