MIMO radar angle-doppler imaging via iterative space-time adaptive processing

Abstract

We consider using multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar to improve the ground moving target indication (GMTI) performance, especially for slowly moving targets, for airborne surveillance systems. The increased virtual aperture afforded by MIMO radar systems enables many advantages, including enhanced spatial resolution, improved parameter identifiability and better performance for GMTI. To obviate the need of secondary data for space-time adaptive processing (STAP), we apply herein a user parameter-free and secondary data-free fully automatic weighted least squares based iterative adaptive approach (IAA) to angle-Doppler imaging via a standard MIMO scheme, two simplified MIMO schemes (which employ switching strategies for transmission), and also a conventional single-input multi-output (SIMO) scheme. The high-resolution angle-Doppler images formed by IAA, using the primary data only, are provided to compare the performance of the three MIMO schemes as well as the SIMO scheme.