Phase-modulated waveform design for target detection in clutter

This paper considers a radar system capable of adaptively adjusting its transmitted waveform, by which the system is able to dynamically mitigate the interference of the clutter, thus improve the detection performance. The key feature of the adaptive mechanism is the optimum waveform design, which is a complex multi-dimension optimizing problem and such a problem in this particular application has not yet been fully studied. Based on the structure of the general likelihood ration test (GLRT) detector and the compound-Gaussian (CG) clutter model, we derive the design objective function for the optimal phase modulated (PM) waveform. Then we simplify the objective function and propose an efficient iterative approach to solve this problem based on the pattern search algorithm. Numerical simulations confirm that the proposed algorithm is efficient to produce optimized waveforms for clutter mitigation in various conditions.