A method of Robust low-angle target height and compound reflection coefficient joint estimation

It is always a challenging issue for radar systems to estimate the height of a low-angle target in the multipath propagation environment. The highly deterministic maximum likelihood estimator has a high accuracy, but the errors of the ground reflection coefficient and the reflecting surface height have serious influence on the method. In this paper, a robust estimation method with less computation burden is proposed based on the compound reflection coefficient multipath model for low-angle targets. The compound reflection coefficient is estimated from the received data of the array and then a one-dimension generalized steering vector is constructed to estimate the target height. The algorithm is robust to the reflecting surface height error and the ground reflection coefficient error. Finally, the experiment and simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.