A convenient formula for the estimation of the clutter rank of the diving platform radar is derived. Brennan's rule provides a general formula to estimate the clutter rank for the side looking radar with a linear array, which is normally called one-dimensional (1D) estimation problem. With the help of the clutter wavenumber spectrum, the traditional estimation of the clutter rank is extended to the diving scenario and the estimation problem is two-dimensional (2D). The proposed rule is verified by the numerical simulations.

A generalized covariance matrix taper (GCMT) model is proposed to enhance the performance of knowledge-aided space-time adaptive processing (KA-STAP) under sea clutter environments. In KA-STAP, improving the accuracy degree of the a priori clutter covariance matrix is a fundamental issue. As a crucial component in the a priori clutter covariance matrix, the taper matrix is employed to describe the internal clutter motion (ICM) or other subspace leakage effects, and commonly constructed by the classical covariance matrix taper (CMT) model. This work extents the CMT model into a generalized CMT (GCMT) model with a greater degree of freedom. Comparing it with the CMT model, the proposed GCMT model is more suitable for sea clutter background applications for its improved flexibility. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the GCMT model under different sea clutter environments.

This letter addresses the problem of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for airborne nonuniform linear array (NLA) radar using a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC). Due to the difficulty of determining the spatial nulls for the NLAs, it is a problem to obtain a valid blocking matrix (BM) of the GSC directly. In order to solve this problem and improve the STAP performance, a BM modification method based on the modified Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization algorithm is proposed. The modified GSC processor can achieve the optimal STAP performance and as well a faster convergence rate than the orthogonal subspace projection method. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

In the localization systems based on time difference of arrival (TDOA), multipath fading and the interference source will deteriorate the localization performance. In response to this situation, TDOA estimation based on blind beamforming is proposed in the frequency domain. An additional constraint condition is designed for blind beamforming based on maximum power collecting (MPC). The relationship between the weight coefficients of the beamformer and TDOA is revealed. According to this relationship, TDOA is estimated by discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The efficiency of the proposed estimator is demonstrated by simulation results.

In the scenario of finite sample size, the performance of the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) is still affected by the desired signal even if all signal sources are independent with each other. Firstly, the novel expression of weight vector of the auxiliary array is derived under the circumstances of finite sample size. Utilizing this new weight vector and considering the correlative interferences, the general expression for the interference cancellation ratio (CR) is developed. Then, the impacts of the CR performance are further analyzed for the parameters including the input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the auxiliary array size, the correlation coefficient between the desired signal and interference as well as the snapshots of the sample data, respectively. Some guidelines can thus be given for the practical application. Numerical simulations demonstrate the agreement between the simulation results and the analytical results.

In this paper, we propose an online antenna-pulse selection method in space time adaptive processing, while maintaining considerable performance and low computational complexity. The proposed method considers the antenna-pulse selection and covariance matrix estimation at the same time by exploiting the structured clutter covariance matrix. Such prior knowledge can enhance the covariance matrix estimation accuracy and thus can provide a better objective function for antenna-pulse selection. Simulations also validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In the traditional time delay estimation methods, it is usually implicitly assumed that the observed signals are either only direct path propagate or coherently received. In practice, the multipath propagation and incoherent reception always exist simultaneously. In response to this situation, the joint maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of multipath delays and system error is proposed, and the estimation of the number of multipath is considered as well for the specific incoherent signal model. Furthermore, an algorithm based Gibbs sampling is developed to solve the multi-dimensional nonlinear ML estimation. The efficiency of the proposed estimator is demonstrated by simulation results.

The recently proposed distributed adaptive direct position determination (D-ADPD) algorithm provides an efficient way to locating a radio emitter using a sensor network. However, this algorithm may be suboptimal in the situation of colored emitted signals. We propose an enhanced distributed adaptive direct position determination (EDA-DPD) algorithm. Simulations validate that the proposed EDA-DPD outperforms the D-ADPD in colored emitted signals scenarios and has the similar performance with the D-ADPD in white emitted signal scenarios.

Bistatic multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar has the capability of measuring the transmit angle from the receiving array, which means the existence of information redundancy and benefits data association. In this paper, a data association decision for bistatic MIMO radar is proposed and the performance advantages of bistatic MIMO radar in data association is analyzed and evaluated. First, the parameters obtained by receiving array are sent to the association center via coordinate conversion. Second, referencing the nearest neighbor association (NN) algorithm, an improved association decision is proposed with the transmit angle and target range as association statistics. This method can evade the adverse effects of the angle system errors to data association. Finally, data association probability in the presence of array directional error is derived and the correctness of derivation result is testified via Monte Carlo simulation experiments. Besides that performance comparison with the conventional phased array radar verifies the excellent performance of bistatic MIMO Radar in data association.