EM-BASED SPARSE IMAGING FOR COLOCATED MIMO RADAR UNDER PHASE
SYNCHRONIZATION MISMATCH
Li Ding, Weidong Chen, Wenyi Zhang
Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, P.R. China
Email: lilyding@mail.ustc.edu.cn, {wdchen, wenyizha}@ustc.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar with colocated
antennas is expected to achieve good imaging performance
via coherent processing. However, a crucial factor to this
process−phase synchronization, which directly determines
the performance gain, has rarely been studied in previous
works. Hence in this paper, given the sparsity of the target, we
address the problem of imaging for colocated MIMO radar
under the phase synchronization mismatch. Based on the
model assumption that the phase synchronization mismatch
in each propagation path is an independent and identically
distributed uniform random variable, we combine the sparsity
of the target and expectation maximization (EM) method to
develop an EM-based sparse imaging algorithm against such
random phase mismatch. The effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm is demonstrated by numerical simulations.
Index Terms— Expectation maximization, MIMO radar,
phase synchronization mismatch, sparse imaging
1. INTRODUCTION
Together with the sparse priority of target, Multiple-input-
multiple-output (MIMO) radar with colocated antennas has
been shown to be of great ability to provide high-resolution
imaging in the wavenumber domain [1] [2] [3].
This good reconstruction performance is mainly brought
by coherent processing. However, the phase synchronization−
a crucial factor to coherent processing− is hard to realize per-
fectly and thus always an inevitable problem. Its imperfect
implementation evidently could lead to performance degrada-
tion. As to phase synchronization mismatch in MIMO radar,
its influence on detection has been studied in [4], on localiza-
tion in [5][6], and further on tracking in [7], but relatively less
attention has been paid on colocated MIMO radar imaging.
Hence, under the premise of sparse target, we investigate the
problem of colocated MIMO radar imaging associated with
random phase synchronization mismatch. In this case, the
The work in this paper is supported by National Natural Science Foun-
dation of China under Grant No. 61172155.
reconstruction is not straightforward because of the random-
ness of phase mismatch, and the conventional sparse recovery
techniques [8], such as the Lasso algorithm, would become
inefficient. So we resort to the combination of expectation
maximization (EM) method [9] and sparsity of target to de-
velop an EM-based sparse imaging algorithm. In addition to
the sparse priority, our algorithm also takes advantage of EM
method to efficiently exploit the statistical property of signal
and provides high reconstruction performance by iteratively
alternating between the expectation stage and maximization
stage.
Notations: (·)
∗
, (·)
T
and (·)
H
denote the conjugate, the
transpose and the conjugate transpose operation respectively.
diag(·) indicates diagonalization while blkdiag(·) is the block
diagonalization. sinh(·), cosh(·) and coth(·) mean the hyper-
bolic sin, the hyperbolic cosine and the hyperbolic cotangent
function, respectively.
2. SIGNAL MODEL
Consider a two dimensional (2-D) colocated MIMO radar
with M transmitters and N receivers in wavenumber domain
[1] . Define (R
T x
m
, ϕ
T x
m
) (for m = 1, · · · , M ) and (R
Rx
n
, ϕ
Rx
n
)
(for n = 1, · · · , N) as the positions in the polar coordinate
of the m-th transmitter and the n receiver, respectively. The
center of imaging scene of interest is regarded as the origin of
the coordinate and we suppose that there are only L scatter-
ers. Exploiting the far-field approximation and orthogonality
separation, we can obtain the echo with the phase synchro-
nization mismatch ψ
nm
at the n-th receiver corresponding to
the m-th transmitter as
y
nm
(f) =
L
l=1
σ (r
l
) e
j2πK
nm
(f )·r
l
e
−jψ
nm
+ z
nm
(f) (1)
where σ(r
l
) denotes the complex reflectivity of the l-th scat-
terer with the location r
l
= (x
l
, y
l
) (for l = 1, · · · , L).
z
nm
(f) is the additive noise. K
nm
(f) indicates the sampling
of 2-D wavenumber domain, given as (K
x
nm
, K
y
nm
),
K
x
nm
(f) =
f+f
m
c
cos ϕ
T x
m
+ cos ϕ
Rx
n
K
y
nm
(f) =
f+f
m
c
sin ϕ
T x
m
+ sin ϕ
Rx
n
(2)