A Novel STAP Algorithm for Airborne MIMO Radar Based on Temporally Correlated Multiple Sparse Bayesian Learning

In a heterogeneous environment, to efficiently suppress clutter with only one snapshot, a novel STAP algorithm for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar based on sparse representation, referred to as MIMOSR-STAP in this paper, is presented. By exploiting the waveform diversity of MIMO radar, each snapshot at the tested range cell can be transformed into multisnapshots for the phased array radar, which can estimate the high-resolution space-time spectrum by using multiple measurement vectors (MMV) technique. The proposed approach is effective in estimating the spectrum by utilizing Temporally Correlated Multiple Sparse Bayesian Learning (TMSBL). In the sequel, the clutter covariance matrix (CCM) and the corresponding adaptive weight vector can be efficiently obtained. MIMOSR-STAP enjoys high accuracy and robustness so that it can achieve better performance of output signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) and minimum detectable velocity (MDV) than the single measurement vector sparse representation methods in the literature. Thus, MIMOSR-STAP can deal with badly inhomogeneous clutter scenario more effectively, especially suitable for insufficient independent and identically distributed (IID) samples environment.