Adaptive polarization design for target detection and tracking

Abstract

Transmitting waveforms with different polarizations in radar systems provide morecomplete information about the target and its environment, ensuring a significantenhancement of the radar’s performance. Conventional polarimetric radars transmitwaveforms with a fixed polarization pattern, independent of the target and cluttercharacteristics. In this chapter, we explore the adaptive design of radar polarizationwaveforms. We focus on a closed-loop system that sequentially estimates thetarget and clutter scattering parameters and then uses these estimates to select thepolarization of the subsequent waveforms.We demonstrate that the radar system performanceis significantly improved when the polarization of the transmitted signalis optimally and adaptively selected to match the polarimetric aspects of the targetand the environment. In particular, we include an overview of our recent results inpolarimetric design for radar detection and tracking.