Abstract: To solve the problem of Direction Of Departure-Direction Of Arrival (DOD-DOA) estimation in bistatic MIMO radar, a fast method based on joint matrix diagonalization is proposed. First, according to the structure of matched filter output, DOD-DOA estimation is transformed to joint matrix diagonalization problem using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and the theorem of rank-1 matrix determined. Then, the Single-Sweep Iterative (SSI) algorithm is used to solve it, and the transmit/receive steering matrices are obtained. Finally, the DOD-DOA can be estimated by spectrum analysis method. The proposed method utilizes all the information of matched filter output, avoiding two-dimensional spectrum peak searching, and possesses an accurate closed form solution at each iteration. The DOD and DOA are automatically paired. Compared with the existence approaches, the proposed algorithm gives better angle estimation accuracy, and the computational cost is effectively reduced. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulation results.