Strong clutter suppression in non‐uniform PRF radar: techniques based on interpolation and adaptive processing

Standard Doppler processing techniques are not capable of controlling strong clutter sidelobes when non-uniform pulse repetition frequency (PRF) radar waveforms are utilised. In this study, the authors propose a weighted bandlimited interpolation (WBI)-based Doppler processing technique, which generates a spectrum similar to that of uniform PRF waveform processing, successfully suppressing undesired spectral sidelobes. Three versions of WBI are introduced: WBI windowed, WBI adaptive, and WBI-principal components inverse (WBI-PCI), and their detection performance is quantified by generating receiver operating characteristics and estimating associated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) losses. The performance of the algorithms is also analysed in terms of computational complexity. The superiority of the proposed WBI techniques compared to existing techniques is also demonstrated. WBI-PCI is an attractive choice for non-uniform PRF waveform processing, given its low SNR loss, low complexity, and low training requirement.