A Flexible Design Strategy for Three-Element Non-Uniform Linear Arrays.

This paper illustrates a flexible design strategy for a three-element non-uniform linear array (NULA) aimed at estimating the direction of arrival (DoA) of a source of interest. Thanks to the spatial diversity resulting from non-uniform sensor spacings, satisfactory DoA estimation accuracies can be achieved by employing a very limited number of receiving elements. This makes NULA configurations particularly attractive for low-cost passive location applications. To estimate the DoA of the source of interest, we resort to the maximum likelihood estimator, and the proposed design strategy is obtained by constraining the maximum pairwise error probability to control the errors occurring due to outliers. In fact, it is well known that the accuracy of the maximum likelihood estimator is often degraded by outliers, especially when the signal-to-noise power ratio does not belong to the so-called asymptotic region. The imposed constraint allows for the defining of an admissible region in which the array should be selected. This region can be further modified to incorporate practical design constraints concerning the antenna element size and the positioning accuracy. The best admissible array is then compared to the one obtained with a conventional NULA design approach, where only antenna spacings multiple of λ/2 are considered, showing improved performance, which is also confirmed by the experimental results.

Dual Cancelled Channel STAP for Target Detection and DOA Estimation in Passive Radar.

This paper deals with the problem of detection and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of slowly moving targets against clutter in multichannel mobile passive radar. A dual cancelled channel space-time adaptive processing (STAP) scheme is proposed, aiming at reducing the system computational complexity, as well as the amount of required training data, compared to a conventional full array solution. The proposed scheme is shown to yield comparable target detection capability and DOA estimation accuracy with respect to the corresponding full array solution, despite the lower computational cost required. Moreover, it offers increased robustness against adaptivity losses, operating effectively even in the presence of a limited set of training data, as often available in the highly non-homogeneous clutter scenarios experienced in bistatic passive radar. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme and its suitability for passive GMTI are demonstrated against both simulated and experimental data collected by a DVB-T-based multichannel mobile passive radar.

A Three-Stage Inter-Channel Calibration Approach for Passive Radar on Moving Platforms Exploiting the Minimum Variance Power Spectrum.

Research in passive radar has moved its focus towards passive radar on moving platforms in recent years with the purpose of moving target indication and ground imaging via synthetic aperture radar. This is also fostered by the progress in hardware miniaturization, which alleviates the installation of the required hardware on moving platforms. Terrestrial transmitters, commonly known as illuminators of opportunity in the passive radar community, usually emit the signals in the Very High Frequency (VHF) or Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band. Due to the long wavelengths of the VHF/UHF band, there are constraints on the size of the used antenna elements, and therefore, the number of antenna elements to be employed is limited, especially as the platform carrying the passive radar system is intended to be small, potentially even an unmanned aerial vehicle. In order to detect moving targets hidden by Doppler shifted clutter returns, one common approach is to suppress the clutter returns by applying clutter suppression techniques that rely on spatial and temporal degrees of freedom, such as Displaced Phase Center Antenna (DPCA) or Space-Time Adaptive Processing. It has been shown that the DPCA approach is a meaningful technique to suppress the clutter if two antenna elements are employed. However, if the employed receiving channels are not carefully calibrated, the clutter suppression is shown to be not effective. Here, we suggest a three-stage calibration technique in order to perform the calibration of two receiving channels, which involves the exploitation of the direct signal, a data-adaptive amplitude calibration, and finally, a data-adaptive calibration of phase mismatches between both receiving channels by the estimation of the Minimum Variance Power Spectrum of the clutter. The validity of the proposed approach is shown with simulated data and demonstrated on real data from a fast ground moving platform, showing improved clutter cancellation capabilities.