Application of State-Estimation Techniques for Spatial, Temporal, and Polarization Diverse Waveforms

A novel radar system design philosophy is presented in which the radar adapts in time as the functional mode and environment evolve. In that context, the main subsystems change to meet performance and functional requirements. Two key aspects of the concept proposed herein are the consideration of the receiver function as a parameter estimation problem, and the selection of the waveform to be transmitted as an optimization problem with information-theoretic criteria. Two new information theoretic for waveform selection in radar and other sensing applications are introduced. One criterion is based on the concept of mutual information, and the other is based on changes in the Fisher information of the received signal. This second criterion is referred to herein as marginal information, to emphasize the fact that it is based on a change in information. Marginal information is itself a novel measure introduced in this work, and is shown to be inherently associated with minimum mean-squared error estimation criteria because Fisher information is related to the Cramer-Rao bound for the estimation error of any unbiased estimator. The original document contains color images.