Coherent Multi-target Localization for Bistatic MIMO Radar Based on Block Hankel Matrix Construction

A new algorithm for angle estimation in the presence of coherent multi-target is presented. A block Hankel matrix is constructed by utilizing the elements of the receive covariance matrix. It is shown that the rank of the block Hankel matrix is equal to the number of targets, and is independent of the coherency of targets. The signal subspace is obtained by using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the block Hankel matrix. Thus the ESPRIT algorithm can directly be applied to estimate the Direction Of Departure (DOD) and the Direction Of Arrival (DOA). The simulation results illustrate that: the DOD and DOA of the coherent target can be estimated efficiently with automatic pairing. And comparing to the two-dimensional spatial smoothing algorithm, the proposed method provides better estimation performance, especially in the condition of low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and low snapshot numbers.