The problem of estimating the parameters of a moving target in multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) radar is considered and a new approach for estimatingthe moving target parameters by making use of the phase information associatedwith each transmit-receive path is introduced. It is required for thistechnique that different receive antennas have the same time reference, but nosynchronization of initial phases of the receive antennas is needed and,therefore, the estimation process is non-coherent. We model the target motionwithin a certain processing interval as a polynomial of general order. Thefirst three coefficients of such a polynomial correspond to the initiallocation, velocity, and acceleration of the target, respectively. A new maximumlikelihood (ML) technique for estimating the target motion coefficients isdeveloped. It is shown that the considered ML problem can be interpreted as theclassic "overdetermined" nonlinear least-squares problem. The proposed MLestimator requires multi-dimensional search over the unknown polynomialcoefficients. The Cram\'er-Rao Bound (CRB) for the proposed parameterestimation problem is derived. The performance of the proposed estimator isvalidated by simulation results and is shown to achieve the CRB.
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