Joint Design of Horizontal and Vertical Polarization Waveforms for Polarimetric Radar via SINR Maximization

For an extended target with different polarimetric responses, one way of improving the detection performance is to exploit waveform diversity on the dimension of polarization. In this article, we focus on the joint design of transmit signal and receive filter for polarimetric radars with local waveform constraints. Considering the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as the figure of merit to optimize, where the average target-impulse-response matrix within a certain target-aspect-angle (TAA) interval is employed as the target response, the waveform is decomposed and then designed for both horizontal and vertical polarization segments, subject to energy and similarity constraints. An iterative algorithm is proposed based on the majorization–minimization method to solve the formulated problem. The developed algorithm guarantees the convergence to a B-stationary point, where in each iteration, optimal horizontal and vertical transmit waveforms are, respectively, solved by using the feasible point pursuit and successive convex approximation technique. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the robustness of the output SINR against the TAA change, and the advantages of polarization diversity and local design.