Adaptive processing for MIMO radar realistic non perfectly orthogonal waveforms

MIMO radar is a promising concept and many theoretical studies have demonstrated its interest, especially for possible improvements in term of target detection and localization. The colored transmission makes it possible to extract each waveform and form the transmission beam by digital processing on the reception side. One strong limitation of this technique is that waveforms cannot be perfectly separated in practice, because of the intrinsic lack of orthogonality of the waveforms family or hardware defaults. In case of conventional radar processing, this badly impacts the performance on target detection. In this paper, we introduce another approach to perform the estimation of target detection and localization based on adaptive processing such as Capon estimation. We define the techniques especially for MIMO radar configurations and we use them on realistic signals, taking into account the properties of non perfect orthogonality of the transmitted MIMO waveforms. We compare the results of the different methods to establish to which extent the performance in target detection can be improved. In some conditions, all sidelobes can be suppressed.