Abstract: To solve the problem of target localization in bistatic MIMO radar, firstly, a sub-beam synthesis (SBS) method is proposed for transmit beamforming. Then, aparallel factor decomposition (PFD) based algorithm is presented to locate multi-target.In SBS method, the transmitted waveforms are weighted to form subbeams, which add in the space and focus the transmit energy on the interested space, and improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR).In PFD based algorithm, according to the algebraic structure of the output of matched filter, the target direction of departures (DODs) and direction of arrivals (DOAs) can be estimated with automatic pairing through the iterative algorithm and angle regression methods. This method avoids two-dimensional (2-D) spectrum peak searching, covariance matrix estimating and the accumulation error caused by several eigen-decompositions. Combining the above two approaches, the localization accuracy can be improved significantly.The simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.