Waveform diversity and optimal change detection

We study the problem of change detection for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) when the reference and mission images are the result of interrogation with different waveforms (waveform diversity). With waveform diversity, the problem of change detection becomes more challenging: The point spread functions of the reference and mission images are different, resulting in suboptimality of existing change detection methods. We define a hypothesis test and derive an optimal change detector under waveform diversity. Our change detector is coherent in that it is capable of detecting phase changes, however, our detector does not take the form of the classical coherent change detector. We apply our change detector to real data collected with Ohio State's software defined radar (SDR).