Maritime Ship Joint Detection and Localization Using GNSS-Based Passive Multistatic Radar

By exploiting the spatial diversity of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based passive multistatic radar, this article proposes a novel joint detection and localization method for maritime moving ships. First, for each bistatic baseline, the weak target energy is concentrated in the range–Doppler (RD) map over the long integration time with a motion compensation technique that needs to search the unknown Doppler frequency rate value. Then, the RD maps pertaining to all bistatic baselines are projected into the Cartesian planes that represent the surveyed area. The projection processing needs to search the unknown X-axis and Y-axis components of the target velocity vector. A quadratic equation is derived to describe the relationship between the Doppler frequency rate and the target velocity vector. Therefore, one of the velocity vector components does not require to be searched, leading to improved computational efficiency. Finally, multistatic integration is performed to combine all Cartesian planes via an objective function, which cannot only focus the target energy for joint detection and localization but also exclude the invalid solution induced by the quadratic equation. Numerical results against the simulations and real experiments demonstrate that the proposed method has close detection, positioning, and velocity estimation capabilities to the existing method but with a much higher computational efficiency.