Improved radar target time-delay estimation with multipath exploitation

A new approach to estimate radar-target parameters in a multipath environment is presented. The novelty of this approach is that the multipath returns are exploited with prior knowledge of the propagation environment. We formulate the estimation problem on two unknown parameters [τ₁,θ_t] and exploit multipath returns via a priori knowledge of the reflecting environment to estimate time delay τ₁ and elevation angle θ_t with a single sensor. It is shown that the performance of the proposed time-delay estimator has better performance than the conventional single path approach.