General Electric Company

Lockheed Martin Corporation

Judson J Gostin

Frank R Dickey, Jr

Kalevi Hoobert Huhta

Ayhan M Vural

Gene P Hammel

An adaptive beamformer and signal processor for sonar and other signal receptor arrays, in which beamforming is accomplished by correlation feedback loops providing matched weighting across the array. To constrain the adaptive beamformer thus comprised against cancellation of useful signals from a particular angular region, which normally is the beam mainlobe or boresight region, one or more spatial notch filters are interposed within the correlation feedback loops for preventing signal suppression within such angular region.

Adaptive beamformer with beam mainlobe maintenance

Disclosed is a radar signal processor providing Moving Target Indicator (MTI) operation with Constant False Alarm Ratio (CFAR) capability. The processor affords substantially reduced incidence of false alarms due to large clutter scatterer returns which exceed normal detection thresholds even after suppression by conventional MTI processing, and at the same time it affords largely unimpaired subclutter visibility. These capabilities are achieved by paralleling the MTI channel with a second processor channel which provides CFAR operation by imposing an additional detection threshold effective to blank the response of the MTI channel to very large clutter scatterers.

Growing community of inventors

Manlius, NY, United States of America

Judson J Gostin