Instantaneous Single-Station Location and Velocity Estimation of Airborne Noncooperative Emitter Using Clutter Angle-Doppler Frequencies

Abstract

Due to the unknown location of the noncooperative airborne emitter, their application as external radiation for passive radar is limited. Therefore, its location and velocity estimation is a significant problem. This article first proposes an airborne emitter location and velocity estimation method in airborne passive radar using angle-Doppler frequencies on the clutter spectrum peaks (SPs). First, the frequencies on clutter SPs in each range bin are estimated by the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) of clutter with sub-aperture smoothing (SASM) techniques. Second, a parametric approach is proposed to formulate the relationship between the frequencies and parameters of interest. Finally, an intermediate unknown is introduced to simplify the 6-D parameter optimization problem into a 1-D search. The advantages: The proposed method utilizes clutter information to enhance observability of single-station in a short period, and robustly estimate the location and velocity with a closed-form solution. Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived for theoretical analysis. Simulation experiments validate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.