Low-Complexity Off-Grid STAP Algorithm Based on Local Search Clutter Subspace Estimation

Space–time adaptive processing (STAP) based on sparse recovery (SR-STAP) techniques exhibits significantly better performance than conventional STAP algorithms within a very small number of snapshots. However, when the clutter patches do not locate exactly on the discrete space–time grid points, the performances of SR-STAP algorithms degrade severely. In this letter, a low-complexity off-grid STAP algorithm based on local search clutter subspace estimation is proposed to overcome this issue. In the proposed algorithm, the global atoms are first selected from the reduced-dimension global STAP dictionary using the design selection criterion. Then, the optimal atoms are searched from the local STAP dictionary. Finally, these space–time steering vectors corresponding to the optimal atoms are used to construct the clutter subspace iteratively, and the STAP weight is obtained by projecting the snapshot on the subspace orthogonal to the clutter subspace. Numerical experiments with both simulated and Mountain-Top data are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.