Efficient Gridless Angle Estimation for Bistatic MIMO Radar With Planar Arrays

Direction finding in bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system is an important issue in target localization. Existing works focus on linear array which can only find 1-D angle information. In this paper, we focus on bistatic MIMO radar where both the transmitter and receiver are equipped with uniform planar arrays (UPAs) which can find full angle information of targets. To overcome the gridding effect, we use atomic norm minimization (ANM) to formulate a gridless model which is equivalent to a semidefinite programming (SDP). By solving the SDP we can obtain the angle estimates without discretizing the 4-D angle space. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based implementation is also derived to reduce the computational complexity of the proposed method. Simulation results show that our proposed method can break through the gridding limitation to achieve a high estimation accuracy while enjoying low computational complexity.