Efficient Orientation Estimation of MIMO Radar Images: Method and Results

Estimating the orientation of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar images is a challenging problem because of the isotropic amplitude spectrum, an inadequate number of line features and the existence of strong noise or clutter. To solve this problem, a scatterer template-based method is proposed in this paper. The key idea of the proposed method is that the inertia of the sampled image with the maximum energy, not the inertia of the original image, is used to estimate the orientation of the MIMO radar image. Because only part of the image at the stored parameter of high-energy scatterers is involved in the calculation of the inertia and because the noise and clutter outside the sampling locations is filtered, more robust performance can be obtained by the proposed method compared with the existed moment method. Numerical simulations are used to test the proposed method.