A Time-Frequency Domain Underdetermined Blind Source Separation Algorithm for MIMO Radar Signals

This paper considers the underdetermined blind separation of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar signals that are insufficiently sparse in both time and frequency domains under noisy conditions, while traditional algorithms are usually applied in the ideal sparse environment. An effective separation method based on single source point (SSP) identification and time-frequency smoothed l0 norm (TF-SL0) is proposed. Firstly, a preprocessing step of the moving average filter and a novel argument-based time-frequency SSPs detection are employed to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and signal sparsity of the observed signals, respectively. Then, the mixing matrix is obtained by using clustering algorithms. Secondly, to obtain the optimal solution of underdetermined sparse component analysis, the smoothed l0 norm (SL0) is introduced to preliminarily achieve signal separation in the time-frequency domain. Finally, time-frequency ridge estimation is proposed to jointly enhance the reconstruction accuracy of the MIMO radar signals, and the time domain waveforms are recovered by the model of the signals. Simulations illustrate the validity of the method and show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional methods in source separation, especially in the non-cooperative electromagnetic case where the prior information is unknown.