STAP performance in K-distributed clutter

We investigate the impact of heterogeneous clutter on STAP performance. The K-distribution is a good fit for many clutter scenes of interest and will be the main focus of this paper. We introduce a cell-based model that can simulate realistic spikiness of heterogeneous clutter, allowing us to empirically measure the losses in detection performance. In particular, it is shown that, for a fixed false-alarm probability of 10−4, the adaptive matched filter attains a probability of detection of 0.55 in severely heterogeneous clutter, compared to the achievable probability of detection of 0.9 in homogeneous clutter. We subsequently investigate the causes for this deterioration in performance.