Abstract: Radar high range resolution profile (HRRP) represents the distribution of the scattering centers on targets along the radar line of sight, which can reflect the structural features of the targets and thus it is widely applied in radar automatic target recognition. This paper proposes a scattering center estimation method via atomic norm minimization. This method approximately model the spectrum of HRRP with the combination of several complex sine signals, in which the amplitude of the complex sine signals corresponds to the intensity of the scattering centers while the frequency corresponds to the position of the scattering centers. This methods directly operates in continuous position space instead of in the discrete position space, which alleviates the basis mismatch effectively. Meanwhile, it does not need the number of scattering centers as priori information and has good robustness to noise. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.