An examination of the application of space time adaptive processing for the detection of maritime surface targets from high altitude airborne platforms

An examination of the application of Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) techniques to real, multi-channel, medium grazing angle, radar sea clutter data is undertaken and the detection performance is quantified against simulated moving maritime surface targets. The application of sub-optimal STAP approaches to the maritime radar detection problem is shown to be complicated by non-stationarity of sea clutter and rapid variations of the sea clutter spectrum due to transient wave activity. Observed performance gains from maritime STAP are much more limited than those observed for Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) due to the inherent spectral width of sea clutter and the slow Doppler velocities of maritime targets. Three sub-optimal STAP processing architectures are examined and PRI-Staggered Post-Doppler is shown to provide consistently superior detection performance for the data set in question.