High Resolution Radar Sensing with Compressive Illumination

Abstract: We present a compressive radar design that combines multitone linear frequency modulated (LFM) waveforms in the transmitter with a classical stretch processor and sub-Nyquist sampling in the receiver. The proposed compressive illumination scheme has fewer random elements resulting in reduced storage and complexity for implementation than previously proposed compressive radar designs based on stochastic waveforms. We analyze this illumination scheme for the task of a joint range-angle of arrival estimation in the multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) radar system. We present recovery guarantees for the proposed illumination technique. We show that for a sufficiently large number of modulating tones, the system achieves high-resolution in range and successfully recovers the range and angle-of-arrival of targets in a sparse scene. Furthermore, we present an algorithm that estimates the target range, angle of arrival, and scattering coefficient in the continuum. Finally, we present simulation results to illustrate the recovery performance as a function of system parameters.