Adaptive waveform design for maximizing practical resolvability of targets

• 1、School of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, ChangSha 410073
• 2、School of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology

Abstract：In the field of target detection and tracking, the resolvability of multiple closely located targets is a significant criterion for measuring the sensing ability of radar and other sensing systems. This paper considers the problem of adaptive radar waveform design to maximize the practical resolvability of closely located targets. Conventional ambiguity function-based radar resolution considers only the waveform, regardless of the influence of noise. However, noise greatly influences the achievable resolution as well as radar detection and tracking performance. As a result of this deficiency in conventional radar resolution, Kullback-Leibler divergence is introduced in this paper in order to quantify the "distance" between two probability density functions of radar measurements in order to represent practical radar resolution, which includes not only the effect of the waveform but also the signal-to-noise ratio and measurement model. Consequently, a new adaptive radar waveform design criterion is proposed, which aims to maximize the practical radar resolution. Moreover, whether two targets can be resolved or not is analyzed and the probability of error of the binary hypothesis testing problem is used to evaluate the practical resolvability. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive waveform design method. The error probability of the binary hypothesis testing problem shows that the adaptive waveform markedly outperforms the fixed waveform.

Keywords： signal processing adaptive waveform design resolution ambiguity function Kullback-Leibler divergence probability of error