A Novel Clutter Suppression Method Based on Sparse Bayesian Learning for Airborne Passive Bistatic Radar with Contaminated Reference Signal

The novel sensing technology airborne passive bistatic radar (PBR) has the problem of being affecting by multipath components in the reference signal. Due to the movement of the receiving platform, different multipath components contain different Doppler frequencies. When the contaminated reference signal is used for space–time adaptive processing (STAP), the power spectrum of the spatial–temporal clutter is broadened. This can cause a series of problems, such as affecting the performance of clutter estimation and suppression, increasing the blind area of target detection, and causing the phenomenon of target self-cancellation. To solve this problem, the authors of this paper propose a novel algorithm based on sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) for direct clutter estimation and multipath clutter suppression. The specific process is as follows. Firstly, the space–time clutter is expressed in the form of covariance matrix vectors. Secondly, the multipath cost is decorrelated in the covariance matrix vectors. Thirdly, the modeling error is reduced by alternating iteration, resulting in a space–time clutter covariance matrix without multipath components. Simulation results showed that this method can effectively estimate and suppress clutter when the reference signal is contaminated.