A capon beamforming method for clutter suppression in colocated compressive sensing based MIMO radars

Compressive sensing (CS) based multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar systems that explore the sparsity of targets in the target space enable either the same localization performance as traditional methods but with significantly fewer measurements, or significantly improved performance with the same number of measurements. However, the enabling assumption, i.e., the target sparsity, diminishes in the presence of clutter, since clutters is highly correlated with the desire target echoes. This paper proposes an approach to suppress clutter in the context of CS MIMO radars. Assuming that the clutter covariance is known, Capon beamforming is applied at the fusion center on compressively obtained data, which are forwarded by the receive antennas. Subsequently, the target is estimated using CS theory, by exploiting the sparsity of the beamformed signals.