Fully adaptive radar for target tracking part II: Target detection and track initiation

Abstract

Most radar systems employ a feed-forward processing chain in which they first perform some low-level processing of received sensor data to obtain target detections and then pass the processed data on to some higher-level processor such as a tracker, which extracts information to achieve a system objective. System performance can be improved using adaptation between the information extracted from the sensor/processor and the design and transmission of subsequent illuminating waveforms. As such, cognitive or fully adaptive radar systems offer much promise. In Part I of this work, we developed a general fully adaptive radar framework and specialized the model for single target tracking. In this paper (Part II), the general framework is specialized for target detection and track initiation. Performance is demonstrated on a distributed sensor system in which system resources (observation time on each sensor) are allocated to optimize new target detection performance.