Extended target tracking with particle filtering in coherent MIMO radar

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting and tracking a target suffering from the appearance of grating lobes with reference to array radar system. Array radar technique is used to improve azimuth resolution with large equivalent aperture. But the need of larger equivalent aperture requires more array elements and/or longer spacing between elements, and then leads to the appearance of grating lobes Target tracking performance, in this case, will suffer serious decrease due to the appearance of grating lobes as the spacing between array elements increasing beyond a half wavelength. There are lots of methods for reducing grating lobes up to the present. However, these methods did not make the most of grating lobes. As grating lobes are shadows of a target, they reveal the position of target implicitly. With evaluating the area of grating lobes and adding these piece of information into tracking algorithm, target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved equivalently. In this work, we propose an effective PF-TBD algorithm exploiting grating lobes for target detection and tracking. Simulation results show that tracking performance can be dramatically increased when the usually discarded information is taken in count.