Waveform Design Based on Mutual Information Upper Bound For Joint Detection and Estimation

Adaptive radar waveform design grounded in information-theoretic principles is critical for advancing cognitive radar performance in complex environments. This paper investigates the optimization of phase-coded waveforms under constant modulus constraints to jointly enhance target detection and parameter estimation. We introduce a unified design framework based on maximizing a Mutual Information Upper Bound (MIUB), which inherently reconciles the trade-off between detection sensitivity and estimation precision without relying on ad hoc weighting schemes. To model realistic, potentially non-Gaussian statistics of target returns and clutter, we adopt Gaussian Mixture Distributions (GMDs), enabling analytically tractable approximations of the MIUB's constituent Kullback-Leibler divergence and mutual information terms. To address the resulting non-convex problem, we propose the Phase-Coded Dream Optimization Algorithm (PC-DOA), a tailored metaheuristic that leverages hybrid initialization and adaptive exploration-exploitation mechanisms specifically designed for phase-variable optimization. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving modestly better detection-estimation trade-off.

SE-BSFV: Online Subspace Learning based Shadow Enhancement and Background Suppression for ViSAR under Complex Background

Video synthetic aperture radar (ViSAR) has attracted substantial attention in the moving target detection (MTD) field due to its ability to continuously monitor changes in the target area. In ViSAR, the moving targets' shadows will not offset and defocus, which is widely used as a feature for MTD. However, the shadows are difficult to distinguish from the low scattering region in the background, which will cause more missing and false alarms. Therefore, it is worth investigating how to enhance the distinction between the shadows and background. In this study, we proposed the Shadow Enhancement and Background Suppression for ViSAR (SE-BSFV) algorithm. The SE-BSFV algorithm is based on the low-rank representation (LRR) theory and adopts online subspace learning technique to enhance shadows and suppress background for ViSAR images. Firstly, we use a registration algorithm to register the ViSAR images and utilize Gaussian mixture distribution (GMD) to model the ViSAR data. Secondly, the knowledge learned from the previous frames is leveraged to estimate the GMD parameters of the current frame, and the Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the subspace parameters. Then, the foreground matrix of the current frame can be obtained. Finally, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used to eliminate strong scattering objects in the foreground matrix to obtain the final results. The experimental results indicate that the SE-BSFV algorithm significantly enhances the shadows' saliency and greatly improves the detection performance while ensuring efficiency compared with several other advanced pre-processing algorithms.