Abstract: This research addresses the problem of joint direction-of-departure (DOD) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for bistatic multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar in the presence of mutual coupling. To exploit the multidimensional structure inherent in the array signal, the matched data are formulated as a three order tensor. Taking the banded Toeplitz structure of the mutual coupling matrix into consideration, the mutual coupling effect can be removed with the property of the same scale transform shared by the parts of the array elements. Combined with the unitary transform technique and forward backward averaging techniques, an expanded trilinear model is constructed. Besides, since the expanded trilinear model is real valued, the proposed algorithm is economic in computation. Finally, simulation examples are taken to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.