Compensation method of multiple-channel amplitude and phase errors for MIMO imaging radar

摘要

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar plays a more and more important role in radar imaging, target detection, and other fields owing to its unique array structure. Transmitting orthogonal signals by different transmitters, a MIMO radar can significantly enhance the azimuth resolution. It forms multiple observation channels from different transmit and receive array elements, achieving an equivalent large aperture in azimuth direction. However, the amplitude and phase errors in each channel are introduced, which will lead to inferior imaging performance of the system, especially in azimuth direction. To solve this problem, a method to estimate the amplitude and phase errors of each channel based on a strong scatterer is proposed here. Peak amplitude of one-dimensional range between channel is estimated using constrained least square (CLS) based on ideal point target characteristics. It proved to be valid by a simulation and an imaging experiment.