A novel high-resolution imaging method using reduced-dimension beamspace unitary MUSIC for OFDM-MIMO radar

Imaging of maneuvering targets has become a challenging topic recently. This study proposes an improved MUSIC-based single-snapshot imaging method for OFDM-MIMO radar. At the transmitter part, for orthogonal waveform generation, the interleaved OFDM structure is developed that each transmitter only radiates at an equidistant set of OFDM subcarriers unique to itself. At the receiver part, a novel preprocessing scheme is presented to separate multiple transmit/receive paths and compensate the reference point. Preprocessed echo matrix can fit the model of two-Dimensional (2D) MUSIC algorithm, except for the coupling between radial/cross-range in the virtual antenna array. Correspondingly, we modify the 2D ElementSpace (ES)-MUSIC. In the meantime, a 2D Reduced-Dimension BeamSpace Unitary-MUSIC (RD-BS-UMUSIC) algorithm is proposed for computational complexity reduction and estimation performance enhancement. Numerical results of a simulated target consists of limited number of scatterers and a complex target (a Boeing 737-800 plane) verify that the proposed algorithm can improve the imaging quality and reduce computational complexity effectively compared with the traditional method.