MIMO radar imaging with imperfect carrier synchronization: A point spread function analysis

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar imaging suffers from performance degradation under carrier offsets across transmitters and receivers. This paper analyzes the impact of carrier offsets on imaging a sparse target, from the perspective of the MIMO point spread function (PSF). Conditions are established for successful support recovery using orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), and the performance loss is characterized in terms of l2 distance. A sparse imaging algorithm taking into account the perturbation due to carrier offsets is also proposed, which improves upon the OMP algorithm. Numerical experiments corroborate this analysis.