Passive multistatic detection by exploiting a sparsity structure of the IO waveform

Passive radar employs existing illuminators of opportunity (IOs) to probe the environment and perform surveillance functions. Such IO signals are often sparse or locally sparse in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a new target detector for multistatic passive radars with multiple distributed receivers by exploiting the sparsity structure of the IO waveform. Two fast implementations of the proposed detector are derived to improve the computational efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches outperform conventional passive detection methods that models the IO signals as unknown without any specific structures, especially when the observation data size is limited.