Geometry-induced range-dependence compensation for bistatic STAP with conformal arrays

Radar space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is a well-suited technique to detect slow-moving targets in the presence of a strong interference background. We consider STAP for a radar operating in a bistatic radar configuration and collecting returns with a conformal antenna array (CAA). The statistics of the secondary data snapshots used to estimate the optimum weight vector are not identically distributed with respect to range, thus preventing the STAP processor from achieving its optimum performance. The compensation of the range-dependence (RD) requires the knowledge of the locus of the clutter signature. We use a new RANSAC-based method for estimating this locus or, equivalently, the flight configuration parameters. Based on this knowledge, we perform an RD compensation of the snapshots to obtain an accurate estimate of the clutter covariance matrix. End-to-end performance analysis in terms of signal-to-inference-plus-noise ratio loss shows that our method yields promising performance.