A nested-PARAFAC based approach for target localization in bistatic MIMO radar systems

Abstract

Bistatic MIMO radar systems gather several advantages such as increased resilience to electronic countermeasures, unknown receiver location, higher identifiability of targets and direct application of several high resolution adaptive techniques. In this paper, we propose a tensor-based method for joint direction of departure (DoD) and direction of arrival (DoA) estimation in bistatic MIMO radar systems. By assuming that the transmit array is divided into two maximally overlapping subarrays, we initially model the cross-covariance matrix of the matched filters outputs as a Nested-PARAFAC decomposition of a fourth-order covariance tensor. Then, exploiting the structure of this decomposition, we first propose a two stage algorithm for joint DoD and DoA estimation of multiple targets based on double alternating least squares (DALS). In addition, for scenarios in which the number of receive antennas exceeds the number of targets, we propose a closed-form solution to the second stage of the proposed method based on the least squares Khatri-Rao factorization (LS-KRF) concept. Simulation results show that the proposed method offers a highly-accurate localization of multiple targets in real-world scenarios where the antenna elements at the transmit and receive arrays have positioning errors as well as less complexity compared to competing state-of-the-art tensor-based solutions.