Aiming at the problem of how to obtain reverberation samples and estimate their covariance matrix in the space-time adaptive processing(STAP) of sonar system, a new space-time adaptive processing method is proposed based on sparse reconstruction of reverberation in this paper. Firstly, according to the space-time distribution characteristics of reverberation received by moving platform sonar, a space-time steering dictionary for sparse reconstruction of reverberation is designed along the relation curve between Doppler frequency shift and incident cone angle cosine of the reverberation unit. Then, a reverberation sample in the rangecell under test (RUT) is reconstructed with high precision by sparse decomposition of signals obtained from the sonar array in the space-time steering dictionary. Finally, based on the prior information of reverberation probability distribution model, a sufficient number of reverberation samples are generated to meet the requirement of performance loss index on reverberation sample size in the space-time adaptive processing, so as to correctly obtain estimation of the covariance matrix of reverberation. This method can reconstruct the reverberation samples and estimate the reverberation covariance matrix directly from the data in RUT without relying on the auxiliary data from units adjacent to the RUT. Therefore, it is not only suitable for the environment with constant reverberation statistical characteristics, but also suitable for the environment with varying statistical characteristics. Simulation results of sonar forward-looking array and side-looking array indicate that the improvement factor of the proposed method is about 10dB lower than the traditional space-time adaptive processing method. So this new STAP method has good anti-reverberation performance.
