ADAPTIVE DPCA RADAR CONCEPT

The technique referred to as displaced phase center antenna (DPCA) has

application in airborne or space borne radar systems requiring adaptive
suppression of jamming and clutter as described by Kelly and Tsandoulas.

With a displaced phase center antenna, stationary ground clutter is

cancelled from a moving platform by employing two or more independent
receive phase centers having well matched main beams.
A two-phase center adaptive DPCA system is depicted in the above
figure, where a moving target and a moving radar are shown. Here, the
full aperture is used for two successive pulse transmissions (positions AT
and BT ) and, on receive, two displaced portions of the aperture are used.
The radar illuminates moving targets and fixed ground terrain which, due
to the radar cross section of the targets and ground terrain, produce the
desired signals and undesired clutter.
Ground-based emitters represent a source of interference or jamming. On
reception, the antenna phase center displacement between receive
apertures is adjusted to compensate for the platform velocity. For two
incident pulses separated in time by one pulse repetition interval (PRI) the
first reception occurs at the forward phase center, denoted A. A second
reception occurs at the trailing phase center, which is denoted B. This
slightly bistatic radar system is equivalent to a monostatic radar system

having two measurements of the signal environment at a single point in

space.

During a PRI, the clutter is effectively stationary; however, during this

interval the
target moves. As a result of this movement, the target has a relative
phase shift. There is no such phase shift from the clutter during this time.
The clutter is assumed to be correlated between the two phase centers. In
contrast, jamming is assumed to be uncorrelated between the two phase
centers due to the one PRI delay imposed in the signal processing. When
the signals received by the two phase centers are adaptively combined in
two stages, the clutter and jammer are significantly cancelled. The target
signal strength received, after adaptive signal processing, depends on the
amount of target phase shift in one PRI.
The ADPCA quiescent main beam pattern match is affected by array
geometry and scan conditions (due to array element mutual coupling),
and hardware tolerances (such as the quantization and random errors of
the transmit/receive (T/R) modules).

WORKING PRINCIPLE
Adaptive processing can be combined with the basic DPCA cancellation to
minimize
the clutter residue at the pro-discussion output and therefore maximize
the improvement factor.
The following discussion of adaptive DPCA is modeled after the
"suboptimum matched filter algorithm" of Shaw and

McAulay(1983).

Figure: Illustration of two pulse cancellation across two received data

streams in ADPCA for a time slip of approximately Ms = 3 PRIs.

ADAPTIVE CLUTTER SUPPRESSION

In the multi-channel case adaptive clutter filtering can be
performed by multiplying the acquired and
preprocessed multi-channel signal with the inverse of the
clutter covariance matrix and a steering vector.
The adaptive weight vector is formed in the following way

where Rw is the clutter covariance matrix of dimension MN

MN and d is the steering vector.
The clutter covariance matrix itself can either be computed
analytically using the known system, antenna and geometry
parameters or, more powerfully, be estimated from the real
data (it is then called Empirical Clutter Covariance Matrix or
Sample Clutter Covariance Matrix). In the latter case the
clutter covariance matrix is adapted to the real clutter
data. The processing is then called Space-Time Adaptive
Processing (STAP).

The empirical clutter covariance matrix

can be computed by averaging training data which shall not
contain moving target signals:

where zk is the MN 1 vector of training data from training cell

k, and K is the total number of used training cells. The
averaging for instance could be performed over range as
exemplarily sketched in the above figure. To exclude potential
moving target signals a guard zone should be used . If again
two successive temporal samples (N = 2) and as steering
vector

are used, this clutter suppression method is of Adaptive DPCA

(ADPCA).