Joint Transmitter and Receiver Polarization Optimization for Scattering Estimation in Clutter

Controlling the polarization information in transmitted waveforms enables improving the performance of radar systems. We consider the design of optimal polarizations at both the radar transmitter and receiver for the estimation of target scattering embedded in clutter. The goal is to minimize the mean squared error of the scattering estimation subject to an average radar pulse power constraint. Under the condition that the target and clutter scattering covariance matrices are known a priori, we show that such a problem is equivalent to the optimal design of a radar sensing matrix that contains the polarization information. We formulate the optimal design as a nonlinear optimization problem and then recast it in a convex form and is thus efficiently solvable by semi-definite programming (SDP). We compare the sensing performance of the optimally selected polarization over conventional approaches. Our numerical results demonstrate that a significant amount of power gain is achieved in the target scattering estimation through such an optimal design.