Research on polarization cancellation of nonstationary ionosphere clutter in HF radar system

Oblique projection polarization filter (OPPF) can be applied as an effective approach for interference cancellation in high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) and other systems. In order to suppress the nonstationary ionosphere clutter further, a novel OPPF based clutter suppressing scheme is proposed in this paper. The polarization and nonstationary characteristic of the clutter are taken into account in the algorithms referred to as range-Doppler domain polarization suppression (RDDPS) and the range-time domain polarization suppression (RTDPS) method, respectively. The RDDPS is designed for weak ionosphere clutter and implemented in the range-Doppler domain directly, whereas the RTDPS algorithm is designed to suppress the powerful ionosphere clutter with a multisegment estimation and suppression scheme. About 15-23 dB signal to interference ratio (SIR) improvement can be excepted when using the proposed method, whereas the targets can be more easily detected in the range-Doppler map. Experimental results demonstrate that the scheme proposed is effective for nonstationary ionosphere clutter and is proven to be a practical interference cancellation technique for HFSWR.