Matching Bistatic Target Responses in Radar Networks to Enable Vectorial Velocity Estimation

Multiple sensors in a radar network can be jointly evaluated to process the bistatic Doppler information of a target obtained under different aspect angles. This enables the estimation of the target’s vectorial velocity in a single snapshot. As a precursor to the joint evaluation, the monostatic and bistatic Doppler components need to be matched for each target in the range-Doppler map. In this work, a new approach for the target matching in the case of a radar-repeater network is presented. The matching is performed based on the correlation of monostatic and bistatic steering vectors extracted from the range-Doppler map for each receive channel of the radar. After validating the matched responses, the vectorial target velocity is determined. The approach is successfully tested with a 77 GHz radar and two repeaters by measurements of rotating cylinders.
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