Monostatic Multiple-input Multiple-output Radar Research Articles

Polynomial rooting-based parameter estimation for polarimetric monostatic MIMO radar

Compared with conventional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, polarimetric MIMO radar has been proven to hold the additional capability to operate data in the joint spatial and polarization domains. However, practical transceivers may involve antenna arrays with classical non-ideal factors (e.g., gain/phase/position errors) and polarimetric non-ideal factors (e.g., polarimetric antenna misorientation), and many current approaches cannot handle such non-ideal factors in real applications. In this study, polynomial rooting-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) and polarization parameter estimation is investigated for polarimetric monostatic MIMO radar with non-ideal transceivers. By incorporating the polarimetric manifold separation (PMS) technique, a joint DOA and polarization parameter estimation method, termed PMS2, is proposed with a closed-form solution. The Cramér-Rao bound for the multi-dimensional parameters involved in the estimation problem is also given. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed PMS2 approach, which is attributed to the compact structure of polarimetric transceivers and the ability of the PMS2 approach to handle the polarimetric properties of signals.

Off-Grid DOA Estimation Using Sparse Bayesian Learning for MIMO Radar under Impulsive Noise.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is an essential and fundamental part of array signal processing, which has been widely used in radio monitoring, autonomous driving of vehicles, intelligent navigation, etc. However, it remains a challenge to accurately estimate DOA for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar in impulsive noise environments. To address this problem, an off-grid DOA estimation method for monostatic MIMO radar is proposed to deal with non-circular signals under impulsive noise. In the proposed method, firstly, based on the property of non-circular signal and array structure, a virtual array output was built and a real-valued sparse representation for the signal model was constructed. Then, an off-grid sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework is proposed and further applied to the virtual array to construct novel off-grid sparse model. Finally, off-grid DOA estimation was realized through the solution of the sparse reconstruction with high accuracy even in impulsive noise. Numerous simulations were performed to compare the algorithm with existing methods. Simulation results verify that the proposed off-grid DOA method enables evident performance improvement in terms of accuracy and robustness compared with other works on impulsive noise.

A Nyström-Based Low-Complexity Algorithm with Improved Effective Array Aperture for Coherent DOA Estimation in Monostatic MIMO Radar

In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm with improved effective aperture for coherent angle estimation in a monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. First, the direction matrix of MIMO radar is mapped into a low-dimensional matrix of virtual uniform linear array (ULA). Then, an augmented data expansion matrix with improved effective aperture is obtained by exploiting the Vandermonde-like structure of the low-dimensional direction matrix and radar cross section (RCS) matrix to enlarge the aperture of the array. Next, a unitary transformation is used to transform the augmented matrix into a real value and the approximate signal subspace of the augmented matrix is obtained by the Nyström method, which can reduce the computational complexity. The eigenvectors of the approximate signal subspace are used to reconstruct the matrix for direct decorrelation processing. Finally, direction of arrivals (DOAs) can be estimated faster by utilizing the unitary ESPRIT algorithm since the rotation invariance of the extended reconstruction matrix still exists. The proposed algorithm has a lower total computational complexity, and the estimation accuracy is improved by utilizing real values and enlarging the array aperture for estimation. Several theoretical analyses and simulation results confirm the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.

A Target Localization Method based on Optimized Newton Algorithm for MIMO Radar

Target localization is one of the fundamental research topics in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar systems. In this paper, we focus on the localization parameter estimation including direction of departure (DoD), direction of arrival (DoA) and radar cross section (RCS) coefficients in monostatic MIMO radar systems. An optimized Newton algorithm is proposed to jointly estimate DoAs/DoDs and RCS coefficients. Its angle estimation performance outperforms traditional Capon, MUSIC and ESPRIT methods. The proposed localization algorithm also has great RCS coefficient estimation performance. Moreover, the joint estimation performance of the proposed optimized Newton algorithm is superior even with unknown target numbers and low sampling numbers. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed optimized Newton algorithm.

Height measurement method of monostatic metre wave multiple input multiple output radar based on coprime array

The height measurement algorithm of metre wave multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar based on uniform linear array (ULA) has some problems, such as a sharp decline of angle measurement accuracy of ultra-low altitude targets and large fluctuation of height measurement with the change of elevation. In order to solve the above difficult problems, starting from the perspective of reducing the influence of multipath effect by array structure, coprime array (CPA) is applied to the height measurement of monostatic metre wave MIMO radar. In this paper, the signal model of monostatic CPA metre wave MIMO radar is established under the condition of flat ground, a height measurement method using physical array is proposed based on the derivation that it is infeasible to use virtual array method for height measurement, it fills the gap of low elevation estimation method based on sparse array metre wave MIMO radar. The proposed method calculates the echo data according to the characteristics of the steering vector of CPA, then obtains the accurate low elevation by using the generalised multiple signal classification algorithm, and finally the target height is obtained by using the geometric relationship. Simulation experiments compare three typical CPAs with ULA using equal array elements, and verify the superiority of height measurement performance of monostatic metre wave MIMO radar based on CPA and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Multi-UAV Cooperative Localization for Marine Targets Based on Weighted Subspace Fitting in SAGIN Environment

As an indispensable part of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed for target positioning and navigation in the space–air–ground-integrated network (SAGIN) environment. Maritime target positioning is very important for the safe navigation of ships, hydrographic surveys, and marine resource exploration. Traditional methods typically exploit satellites to locate marine targets in the SAGIN environment, and the location accuracy does not satisfy the requirements of modern ocean observation missions. In order to localize the marine target, we develop a system architecture in this article, which contains UAVs integrated with monostatic multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radars. The main thrust is to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) via MIMO radar. Herein, we consider a general scenario that unknown mutual coupling exist and a novel sparse reconstruction algorithm is proposed. The mutual coupling matrix (MCM) is adopted with the help of its special structure, we formulate the data model as a sparse representation form. Then, two novel matrices, a weighted matrix, and a reduced-dimensional matrix are constructed to reduce the computational complexity and enhance the sparsity, respectively. Thereafter, a sparse constraint model is constructed using the concept of optimal weighted subspace fitting (WSF). Finally, the DOA estimation of maritime targets can be achieved by reconstructing the support of a block sparse matrix. Based on the DOA estimation results, multiple UAVs are used to cross-locate marine targets multiple times, and an accurate marine target position is achieved in the SAGIN environment. Numerical results are carried out, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed DOA estimator, and the multi-UAV cooperative localization system can realize accurate target localization.

Monostatic MIMO radar direction finding in impulse noise

This work considers direction-finding using a monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar in the presence of impulsive noise. Employing a novel low-order covariance-based exponential kernel function, the proposed maximum likelihood (ML) formulation exploits an introduced quantum whale optimization algorithm (QWOA) to form the direction estimates. The resulting estimates are shown to be robust to the presence of impulsive noise, offering preferable performance as compared to recent related approaches, even in cases when the number of available snapshots is small.

RxCV-based unitary SBL algorithm for off-grid DOA estimation with MIMO radar in unknown non-uniform noise

As an indispensable part of array signal processing, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation has been well investigated over the past few decades, and many excellent DOA estimation methods have been proposed. In this paper, a receiving domain covariance vector (RxCV) based unitary SBL algorithm is proposed for the off-grid DOA estimation of monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar in unknown non-uniform noise environment. In the proposed algorithm, the data received by MIMO radar is firstly transformed into receiving domain by a reshape operation. Then the RxCV-based unitary off-grid sparse model without non-uniform noise is constructed through unitary transformation and first-order linear approximation, where the unknown non-uniform noise is got rid off by a linear transformation. Based on the RxCV-based unitary off-grid sparse model, the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) criterion is adopted to estimate the parameters, where signal variance and off-gird error are estimated by using expectation-maximization (EM) strategy. The DOA estimation is ultimately realized through 1-dimensional spectrum search of the received data. Results of the simulation experiments have provided the evidence of that the proposed algorithm is robustness against nonuniform noise and off-grid error, and it can maintain superior DOA estimation performance compared with other reported sparse signal representation based methods.

A novel reduced-dimensional beamspace unitary ESPRIT algorithm for monostatic MIMO radar

In this paper, a novel direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm is proposed for monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Due to redundancy of the received data of monostatic MIMO radar, the computational complexity of the inversion of the covariance matrix is increased. In order to reduce the large computational complexity of existing subspace-based algorithms, we perform two reduced-dimensional operations. First, the high-dimensional received data is transformed the low-dimensional received data through a special transformation matrix. Second, the low-dimensional received data is transformed into beamspace. The receive beamspace filter is designed using convex optimization, and it can flexibly control the bandwidth and limit the sidelobe level. To ensure that the converted noise is Gaussian white noise, the prewhitening process is performed. Based on the above precondition, the reduced-dimensional beamspace technique can be effectively combined with the unitary ESPRIT model. Finally, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on angle estimation in element space and reduced-dimensional beamspace is calculated for performance analysis. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Iterative reweighted proximal projection based DOA estimation algorithm for monostatic MIMO radar

The problem of nonconvex and nonsmooth sparse representation for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is addressed in this paper, which is dealt with by a novel iterative reweighted proximal projection method. The proposed method firstly obtains the array covariance vector by performing the vectorization operation on the reduced dimensional covariance matrix. Then a sparse representation framework is formulated for DOA estimation through minimizing the nonconvex and nonsmooth sparsity promoting function, and the weighted matrix, which is based on the high-order power of the inverse of the reduced dimensional covariance matrix, is designed for reweighting the nonconvex and nonsmooth minimization to enhance the sparsity of the solution. Thereafter, an iterative algorithm using proximal projection approach along with reweighted penalty ideas is developed to recover the sparse solution. Finally, DOA estimation is accomplished by searching the spectrum of the solution. Due to achieving a better approximation to the l0 norm, the proposed method exhibits better DOA estimation accuracy than the reweighted l1-SVD algorithm and reweighted SL0 algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed method can avoid any a-priori information on the number of targets. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

CRBs for direction‐of‐departure and direction‐of‐arrival estimation in collocated MIMO radar in the presence of unknown spatially coloured noise

This study gives explicit closed-form expressions of the stochastic Cramer–Rao bounds (STO-CRBs) on direction-of-departure and direction-of-arrival estimation accuracies for collocated multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radar with unknown spatially coloured noise. In some special cases, i.e. the CRB of direction estimation accuracy for monostatic MIMO radar, the white noise scenario is discussed. Theoretical comparisons between the STO-CRBs and the deterministic ones are presented. Finally, these bounds are numerically compared.

The Effect of Antenna Mutual Coupling on MIMO Radar System Performance

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems use orthogonal signaling to enable combined transmit and receive beamforming through signal processing on the received signals. Because of the combined role of transmit and receive arrays in this processing for monostatic MIMO radar, mutual coupling present in these arrays impacts the beamforming in a unique way. This paper presents a mathematical model of a MIMO radar with coupled antennas and appropriate radio frequency circuitry. Application of the model to evaluate radar detection of a single target demonstrates that coupling can result in target detection angles that are in error by as much as 12° and increase beamformer response sidelobe levels by as much as 8 dB. The results also show that a simple matching network can improve detection performance, particularly when array mutual coupling is high.

Clutter-based gain and phase calibration for monostatic MIMO radar with partly calibrated array

Abstract The gain and phase calibration of monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars with partly calibrated arrays is addressed and a clutter-based orthogonal projection (OP) method is introduced. When the transmitter and receiver of a monostatic MIMO radar are both uniform linear arrays with the same array spacing, a non-zero OP matrix for the joint transmit-receive array steering vectors can be found. The clutter output power projected on the OP matrix is zero if array is perfectly calibrated. Hence, the transmitter gain and phase can be calibrated by minimizing clutter projection output power for a well-calibrated receiver subarray. Subsequently, the unknown receiver gain and phase errors can be estimated with a similar projection method. Numerical simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

AOA, Delay, and Complex Propagation Factor Estimation for the Monostatic MIMO Radar System

In this paper, we propose a solution to find the angle of arrival (AOA), delay, and the complex propagation factor for the monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system. In contrast to conventional iterative computationally demanding estimation schemes, we propose a closed form solution for most of the previous parameters. The solution is based on forming an approximate correlation matrix of the received signals at the MIMO radar receiver end. Then, an eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) is performed on the formed approximate correlation matrix. The AOAs of the received signals are deduced from the corresponding eigenvectors. Then, the delays are estimated from the received signal matrix properties. This is followed by forming structured matrices which will be used to find the complex propagation factors. These estimates can be used as initializations for other MIMO radar methods, such as the maximum likelihood algorithm. Simulation results show significantly low root mean square error (RMSE) for AOAs and complex propagation factors. On the other hand, our proposed method achieves zero RMSE in estimating the delays for relatively low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).

Low angle estimation for MIMO radar with arbitrary array structures

ABSTRACTLow angle target estimation is always a difficult problem for radar elevation estimation. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar can increase array degree of freedom and resolution, and improve the low angle target measurement precision. At the same time, the computation complexity of the MIMO radar is also increasing, especially for non-uniform linear array (ULA) configuration in which some fast algorithms cannot be used. In this paper, a fast low angle target estimation method is proposed for monostatic MIMO radar with arbitrary array configurations. With the array interpolation and the quasi-spatial-smoothing technique, the MIMO steering vector can be transformed into a virtual low dimension (typical similar size as the number of array elements) ULA steering vector. Then, the polynomial rooting algorithm is used to estimate the elevation of the low angle target. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm are presented and the performances are investigated and analysed.

Angle Estimation in Monostatic MIMO Radar with Low-Complexity Beamspace Unitary ESPRIT

A low-complexity angle estimation method for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar using beamspace unitary estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) is presented. Reduced-dimensional transformation is firstly utilized as a pre-processing to obtain the reduced-dimensional data matrix, and then a conjugate centrosymmetric discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix is employed to map the received data into lower-dimensional beamspace and transforms the complex covariance matrix into a realvalued one. At last, the rotational invariance structure of the real-valued signal subspace is constructed in the beamspace to obtain the estimation of direction of arrival (DOA). Compared with the other ESPRIT algorithms, the proposed method can achieve improved estimation performance with a significantly reduced computational complexity. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Polarisation smoothing generalised MUSIC algorithm with PSA monostatic MIMO radar for low angle estimation

The polarisation smoothing generalised multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm for low angle estimation with polarisation sensitive array (PSA) monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is proposed. The proposed method takes advantage of the virtual aperture of the MIMO radar and the polarisation diversity of the PSA simultaneously to improve the resolution, which has better performance than generalised MUSIC algorithm when the direct and the reflected signals are out of phase. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Sparse Bayesian Learning-Based Target Imaging and Parameter Estimation for Monostatic MIMO Radar Systems

This paper presents novel sparse Bayesian learning (SBL)-based target imaging and parameter estimation techniques in monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems for practical scenarios with insufficient observation samples and unknown target parameters. First, the SBL framework is developed for a single measurement vector setting with an underlying sparse target reflectivity parameter vector. This is subsequently extended to scenarios with multiple observation snapshots considering uncorrelated as well as correlated target reflectivity parameters. Variants are also proposed for challenging scenarios considering the presence of ground clutter. Cramer-Rao bounds are derived for the reflectivity, Doppler, and range estimates to comprehensively characterize the performance of the proposed estimation schemes. A joint parameter estimation and imaging scheme is developed based on a Taylor series expansion of the MIMO radar dictionary matrix. Simulation results demonstrate enhanced imaging and estimation accuracy of the proposed SBL schemes in comparison with the existing techniques for MIMO radar systems.

A sparse direction-of-arrival estimation algorithm for MIMO radar in the presence of gain-phase errors

In this paper, the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar with gain-phase errors is addressed, by using a sparse DOA estimation algorithm with fourth-order cumulants (FOC) based error matrix estimation. Useful cumulants are designed and extracted to estimate the gain and the phase errors in the transmit array and the receive array, thus a reliable error matrix is obtained. Then the proposed algorithm reduces the gain-phase error matrix to a low dimensional one. Finally, with the updated gain-phase error matrix, the FOC-based reweighted sparse representation framework is introduced to achieve accurate DOA estimation. Thanks to the fourth-order cumulants based gain-phase error matrix estimation, and the reweighted sparse representation framework, the proposed algorithm performs well for both white and colored Gaussian noises, and provides higher angular resolution and better angle estimation performance than reduced-dimension MUSIC (RD-MUSIC), adaptive sparse representation (adaptive-SR) and ESPRIT-based algorithms. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.

Low-complexity ESPRIT-based DOA estimation for MIMO radar with L-shaped array

ABSTRACTAiming at the problem of two-dimensional (2D) angles estimation for monostatic multiple-input–multiple-output radar with L-shaped array, a novel reduced-dimensional (RD) direction of arrival estimation (DOA) method based on estimation of signal parameters by rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm is proposed. First, through the RD matrix design and RD transformation, the higher dimensional received data can be transformed into a lower dimensional signal space. Then the signal space can be achieved via the eigen-value decomposition. Last, conjoint with the ESPRIT algorithm, 2D spatial angle parameters with automatic pairing can be jointly estimated. The proposed method can remove data redundancy of high dimensional received data at the greatest degree and enhance sensors efficiency without costing the aperture of array, with a result of better performance than 2D-ESPRIT algorithm. Moreover, compared with the multiple signal classification (MUSIC)-like algorithms, the proposed method has the better overall performance and is more available for a lower computation complexity and higher instantaneity of application. Simulation results verify that the correctness of theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of proposed algorithm.