Adaptive polarization design for target detection and tracking

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