Low elevation target altitude measurement for ubiquitous radar based on known transmitted waveform and sparse representation

Abstract The multipath effect deteriorates the performance of low elevation target altitude estimation with a ubiquitous radar strongly, especially in complex terrain environments in which multiple reflection paths exist simultaneously. This work shows how the authors reconstructed a multipath model for ubiquitous radar with a known waveform and took advantage of it to improve the altitude measurement performance when locating low‐altitude small targets in complex terrain environments. The authors first present a multipath propagation model for target elevation angle estimation in which not only received multipaths but also transmitted multipaths are taken into consideration. Then, a reconstructed elevation angle estimation model in which the waveform is known and the target elevation information is as same as the original model is derived. Finally, an innovative low elevation angle estimation algorithm based on a maximum likelihood estimator and a sparse representation is proposed. Simulations and experiment results verify that the proposed algorithm has a much more robust low elevation angle estimation performance than existing methods in complex terrain environments. Index Terms—Target altitude measurement, complex multipath effect, known transmitted waveform, sparse representation, ubiquitous radar.