SF-ESPRIT: An Efficient 3D Localization for MIMO SFCW Radars using Space-Frequency Array

In this paper, the problem of 3D localization of multiple point targets with Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) radar is considered. We propose to combine the channel response of the virtual Uniform Rectangular Array (vURA) obtained by scanning at uniformly spaced frequency points to form a larger array referred as Space-Frequency (SF) array. Towards estimating jointly the azimuth, elevation and range of multiple targets with this SF-array, we propose a new ESPRIT based algorithm which we refer to as SF-ESPRIT. The localization capability of SF-ESPRIT largely depends upon the number of frequency scanning points, and further possess the ability to localize far more targets than the dimension of the vURA. In addition, the inter-element spacing requirement of vURA is also greatly relaxed. We show that with this proposed approach one can obtain much better localization performance with fewer elements than the standard existing methods. Appropriate numerical results are presented to corroborate these findings.