An ASC‐Based Unitary Matrix Pencil Method for Parameter Estimation of Group Target

Abstract

The unitary matrix pencil (UMP) method has been successfully applied to antenna array optimization. In this paper, the UMP method is applied to the parameter estimation of target detection based on the attributed scattering center (ASC) model. This method can accurately estimate the number of arbitrary group targets in the space. First, the RCS is reconstructed based on the ASC model. Since the unitary matrix can be used to process the parameter estimation of the echo with “sum of attenuation exponents,” the unitary matrix is constructed by the samples from this reconstructed RCS. Moreover, the stronger scattering center can be characterized via the larger singular values, and the number of group targets can be obtained by solving the number of large singular values. Then, singular value decomposition is performed on this unitary matrix, and some larger singular values are screened by setting an appropriate threshold. The higher estimation accuracy can be obtained by fusing the echoes from multiple frequencies and angles. Besides, the estimation accuracies of this proposed method in this paper are discussed under different signal‐to‐noise ratios considering the noise in the actual scene. Simulation results show that this method can effectively and accurately estimate the number of group targets, and it shows strong robustness.