Efficient direct position-velocity determination for multiple targets in distributed SIMO radar via parameter decoupling

In order to efficiently measure the positions and velocities of multiple targets by distributed Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) staring radar, this paper proposes a direct position-velocity estimation algorithm that decouples motion parameters between targets. Firstly, a time-domain decoupling method is developed to obtain rough estimates of multi-target position and velocity by exploiting the differences in processed echoes induced by range resolution, which effectively reduces the dimensionality of the parameter search space required for computing the cost function. Following this, an alternating iterative estimation mechanism is implemented to reduce the impact of range side lobes, thereby ensuring the precision of measurement. Notably, the proposed algorithm can still effectively decouple multiple target parameters even under single-channel wide-beam antenna configurations with limited angular resolution. The simulation results show that the proposed direct position and velocity determination method achieves similar performance and has much less computational complexity compared to traditional maximum likelihood estimation.