1 MIMO Radar Moving Target Detection in Homogeneous Clutter Qian He, Nikolaus H. Lehmann, Rick S. Blum, Fellow, IEEE, and Alexander M. Haimovich, Senior Member, IEEE, Abstract A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar approach employing widely-dispersed transmit and receive an- tennas is studied for the detection of moving targets. The MIMO approach transmits orthogonal waveforms from the different transmit antennas so these waveforms can be separated at each receive antenna. For a moving target in colored Gaussian noise-plus-clutter, we quantify the gains from having widely-dispersed antennas that allow the overall system to “view” the target simultaneously from several different directions. The MIMO radar performance is contrasted with that of a traditional phased-array approach, which employs closely-spaced antennas for this purpose. The MIMO radar approach is well suited to handle targets that have small radial velocities for scenarios in which co-located sensors cannot separate the target from the background clutter. Both a centralized processing and a simple distributed processing form of the MIMO radar approach are developed and studied, and the gains from the centralized version, which come at the price of additional complexity, are clearly demonstrated and explained intuitively. The constant false alarm rate property of an adaptive version of the MIMO moving target detector is also demonstrated for homogeneous clutter. Index Terms Moving target detection (MTD), centralized processing, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Q. He is with the EE Department, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054 China. This work was done while she was visiting Lehigh University (email: qih207@lehigh.edu). R. S. Blum is with the ECE Department, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015 USA (email: rblum@eecs.lehigh.edu). N. H. Lehmann and A. M. Haimovich are with the ECE Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102 USA (email: lehmann@njit.edu; haimovich@njit.edu). Q. He’s work was supported by China Scholarship Council. R. S. Blum’s work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory under agreement No. FA9550-06-1-0041, the National Science Foundation under grant No. CCF-0829958, and the U.S. Army Research Office under grant No. W911NF-08-1-0449. A. M. Haimovich’s work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under agreement No. FA9550-06-1-0026.