February 2013

Journal

OFDM Radar Space-Time Adaptive Processing by Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Sparsity

By:
Sen, Satyabrata
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
Page Number:
118-130
Volume:
61
Issue Number:
1
Publication Date:
February 2013
View DOI Listing:
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2012.2222387

Abstract

We propose a sparsity-based space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithm to detect a slowly-moving target using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) radar. We observe that the target and interference spectra are inherently sparse in the spatio-temporal domain. Hence, we exploit that sparsity to develop an efficient STAP technique that utilizes considerably lesser number of secondary data and produces an equivalent performance as the other existing STAP techniques. In addition, the use of an OFDM signal increases the frequency diversity of our system, as different scattering centers of a target resonate at different frequencies, and thus improves the target detectability. First, we formulate a realistic sparse-measurement model for an OFDM radar considering both the clutter and jammer as the interfering sources. Then, we apply a residual sparse-recovery technique based on the LASSO estimator to estimate the target and interference covariance matrices, and subsequently compute the optimal STAP-filter weights. Our numerical results demonstrate a comparative performance analysis of the proposed sparse-STAP algorithm with four other existing STAP methods. Furthermore, we discover that the OFDM-STAP filter-weights are adaptable to the frequency-variabilities of the target and interference responses, in addition to the spatio-temporal variabilities. Hence, by better utilizing the frequency variabilities, we propose an adaptive OFDM-waveform design technique, and consequently gain a significant amount of STAP-performance improvement.