Angle estimation and mutual coupling self-calibration for ULA-based bistatic MIMO radar

In this paper, we propose an effective scheme for angle estimation and array mutual coupling (MC) self-calibration in uniform linear arrays (ULA)-based bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. By exploiting the multidimensional inherent structure, the array data is formulated into a trilinear model. The transmit and receive direction matrices are primarily estimated via trilinear decomposition, after which the least square (LS) method is applied to obtain a rough angle estimation. Refined angles are achieved via two one-dimensional local searches. The MC coefficients are obtained via LS by utilizing the estimated angle prior. The proposed scheme can achieve automatic pairing of the estimated angles without any virtual aperture loss, thus it has better angle and MC estimation performance than existing methods. Numerical simulations verify the improvement of our scheme.