Stochastic Particle-Based Variational Bayesian Inference for Multi-band Radar Sensing

Multi-band fusion is an important technology to improve the radar sensing performance. In the multi-band radar sensing signal model, the associated likelihood function has oscillation phenomenon, which makes it difficult to obtain high-accuracy parameter estimation. To cope with this challenge, we divide the radar target parameter estimation into two stages of coarse estimation and refined estimation, where the coarse estimation is used to narrow down the search range for the refined estimation, and the refined estimation is based on the Bayesian approach to avoid the convergence to a bad local optimum of the likelihood function. Specifically, in the coarse estimation stage, we employ a root MUSIC algorithm to achieve initial estimation. Then, we apply the block stochastic successive convex approximation (SSCA) approach to derive a novel stochastic particle-based variational Bayesian inference (SPVBI) algorithm for the Bayesian estimation of the radar target parameters in the refined stage. Unlike the conventional particle-based VBI (PVBI) in which only the probability of each particle is optimized and the per-iteration computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of particles, the proposed SPVBI optimizes both the position and probability of each particle, and it adopts the block SSCA to significantly improve the sampling efficiency by averaging over iterations. As such, it is shown that the proposed SPVBI can achieve a better performance than the conventional PVBI with a much smaller number of particles and per-iteration complexity. Finally, extensive simulations verify the advantage of the proposed algorithm over various baseline algorithms.