Synthetic Aperture Based Moving Targets Localization Using Mobile OTFS Radar

Abstract

This paper proposes a low-complexity localization framework for moving targets using a single-antenna mobile radar platform with orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) waveforms. Unlike conventional approaches requiring antenna arrays or multistatic configurations, the proposed method exploits synthetic aperture (SA) motion to estimate target positions from estimated delay-Doppler (DD) parameters. An efficient DD tracking algorithm is introduced to incrementally update delay and Doppler estimates across OTFS blocks, avoiding full re-estimation and reducing computational overhead. Then, a geometry-based localization strategy reconstructs the target coordinates from the quadratic curvature of the slant-range trajectory during the aperture-synthesizing period. Simulation results demonstrate the impacts of the synthesis aperture, platform and target velocities on the achievable localization accuracy.