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Adaptive Waveform Design for Improved Detection of Low-RCS Targets in

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56 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007
Adaptive Waveform Design for Improved Detection
of Low-RCS Targets in Heavy Sea Clutter
Sandeep P. Sira, Douglas Cochran, Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola, Senior Member, IEEE, Darryl Morrell,
William Moran, Member, IEEE, Stephen D. Howard, and Robert Calderbank, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—The dynamic adaptation of waveforms for trans-
mission by active radar has been facilitated by the availability of
waveform-agile sensors. In this paper, we propose a method to em-
ploy waveform agility to improve the detection of low radar-cross
section (RCS) targets on the ocean surface that present low
signal-to-clutter ratios due to high sea states and low grazing
angles. Employing the expectation-maximization algorithm to
estimate the time-varying parameters for compound-Gaussian
sea clutter, we develop a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT)
detector and identify a range bin of interest. The clutter estimates
are then used to dynamically design a phase-modulated waveform
that minimizes the out-of-bin clutter contributions to this range
bin. A simulation based on parameters derived from real sea
clutter data demonstrates that our approach provides around 10
dB improvement in detection performance over a nonadaptive
system.
Index Terms—Detection, sea clutter, waveform design, wave-
form-agile sensing.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE detection of small targets on the ocean surface by
active radar is particularly challenging due to the low
signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) that can result from low grazing
angles and high sea states. Advances in radar technology that
permit pulse-to-pulse waveform agility provide many oppor-
tunities for improved performance. For example, waveforms
can be adapted to match the target characteristics and the envi-
ronment or a desirable level of estimation accuracy of specific
Manuscript received September 1, 2006; revised February 14, 2007. This
work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Defense under Multi
University Research Initiative Grant AFOSR FA9550-05-1-0443 administered
by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; by DARPA, Waveforms for Ac-
tive Sensing Program under NRL Grant N00173-06-1-G006; and the Interna-
tional Science Linkages established under the Australian Government’s innova-
tion statement “Backing Australia’s Ability.” The associate editor coordinating
the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Maria
Sabrina Greco.
S. P. Sira, D. Cochran, and A. Papandreou-Suppappola are with the Depart-
ment of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287
USA (e-mail: ssira@asu.edu; cochran@asu.edu; papandreou@asu.edu).
D. Morrell is with the Department of Engineering, Arizona State University
Polytechnic Campus, Mesa, AZ 85212 USA (e-mail: morrell@asu.edu).
W. Moran is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia (e-mail: b.moran@ee.unimelb.
edu.au).
S. D. Howard is with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Ed-
inburgh, Australia (e-mail: show@ee.unimelb.edu.au).
R. Calderbank is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton
University, Princeton, NJ 08540 USA (e-mail: calderbk@math.princeton.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTSP.2007.897048
1932-4553/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
target parameters. This paper proposes an approach to the
suppression of sea clutter using waveforms that are designed
on-the-fly to minimize the effect of clutter in areas of interest,
thereby improving target detection performance.
Recent work on dynamic waveform adaptation, to improve
tracking performance, for example, has often assumed perfect
detection [1], [2] or simplistic clutter models [3], [4]. While this
may be appropriate when the signal-to-noise ratio is high, nei-
ther assumption is justified in scenarios that involve heavy sea
clutter. Early investigations of detection in the presence of in-
terference in space-time adaptive processing [5], and waveform
design for clutter rejection [6], assumed that the clutter returns
were independent, and identically Gaussian distributed. How-
ever, when a radar has a spatial resolution high enough to re-
solve structure on the sea surface, the Gaussian model fails to
predict the observed increased occurrence of higher amplitudes
or spikes. This lead researchers to use two-parameter distribu-
tions to empirically fit these longer tails [7]. As a result, the com-
pound-Gaussian (CG) model for sea clutter has now gained wide
acceptance [8], [9] and has been tested both theoretically [10]
as well as empirically [11].
Both coherent detection [9] and waveform optimization [12]
in non-Gaussian backgrounds require knowledge of the statis-
tics of the clutter echoes and, in [13] for example, the target
impulse response. However, the dynamic nature of the ocean
surface necessitates a reliance on estimates of the statistics,
thus precluding optimal solutions. Moreover, these approaches
typically seek optimal but fixed, or dynamically nonadaptive,
waveform designs, that fail to exploit the potential of waveform
agility.
The main contribution of this paper is a methodology to adapt
the transmitted waveform on-the-fly, based on online estima-
tion of sea clutter statistics for improved target detection. It is
motivated by the fact that, in a radar, the signal obtained after
matched filtering at the receiver is a convolution of the ambi-
guity function of the transmitted signal with the radar scene [14],
which smears energy from one range-Doppler cell to another.
Therefore, the incorporation of information about the clutter
into the design of a waveform whose ambiguity function min-
imizes this smearing in the region of interest, can improve the
SCR and detection performance. In our proposed method, the
statistics of the clutter at different ranges are estimated using the
expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and are then used to
design a phase-modulated (PM) waveform for the next trans-
mission that improves the SCR. Using clutter covariance esti-
mates derived from real data, we provide numerical simulation
examples to demonstrate around 10 dB improvement in detec-
tion performance for a single target. Although the development
SIRA et al.: ADAPTIVE WAVEFORM DESIGN
is focused purely on range estimation, it is believed to be appli-
cable to range-Doppler estimation; this is the subject of ongoing
research.
The use of principal component analysis (PCA) for the miti-
gation of colored interference is well known [15]. This approach
can be used to exploit the spatial and temporal correlations in sea
clutter returns [11] to mitigate them as was demonstrated in [16].
The primary difficulty with this approach revolves around the
estimation of the interference covariance matrix [17], [18] and
the subsequent determination of a low-rank interference sub-
space. Assuming a high pulse-repetition frequency (PRF), we
use the CG model to demonstrate that we can form a wave-
form-independent estimate of the clutter subspace. The orthog-
onal projection of the received signal into this subspace provides
appreciable clutter suppression.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we describe
the CG model for sea clutter and the processing of the received
signal. Section III presents the estimation of the clutter statistics,
while Section IV describes the generalized likelihood ratio test
(GLRT) detector. The design of a PM waveform is described in
Section V, and simulation examples are presented in Section VI.
II. SIGNAL AND SEA CLUTTER MODELING
We consider a medium-PRF radar that transmits pulses
in a dwell on a region of interest before switching to other
tasks. Each dwell consists of two sub-dwells, Sub-dwells 1
and 2, during which identical pulses of the waveforms
and are transmitted, respectively. The implied
waveform agility is thus between sub-dwells rather than on
a pulse-to-pulse basis. Each pulse returns a view of the radar
scene which consists of clutter and the target, if present. In
this section, we describe the CG model for sea clutter and the
processing of the received signal.
A. Sea Clutter Modeling
According to the CG model, sea clutter returns are believed to
be the result of two components: a speckle-like return that arises
due to a large number of independent scattering centers reflecting
the incident beam, and a texture caused by large-scale swell struc-
tures that modulates the local mean power of the speckle return
[7],[19].ThespecklegivesrisetolocallyGaussianstatistics,char-
acterized by short correlation time ( ms), while the texture
decorrelates much less rapidly ( s) [7], [8], [11]. The texture
component also exhibits spatial correlation that depends on the
range resolution, sea state, and wind speed [20]. Its probability
distribution has been the subject of much investigation. From var-
ious studies, sea clutter has been modeled to have K, log-normal,
or Weibull distributions [7]. In this paper, we will not assume any
particular distribution for the texture, as it is not needed for our
waveform design.
The radar scene is defined to consist of a number of clutter
scatterers and at most one point target, distributed in range and
Doppler. In each range-Doppler cell, the number of scatterers is
assumed to follow a Poisson distribution with a rate determined
by the cell volume and a clutter density . The complex reflec-
tivity
(1)
57
of the th scatterer over pulses, conditioned on the texture
, and speckle covariance matrix with
denoting the identity matrix, is a circular complex
Gaussian random vector with zero mean and covariance matrix
, or [9]. Thus, the samples in (1) are
correlated and is nonwhite. Given the texture and the speckle
covariance matrix, the reflectivities of two scatterers and
are independent so that
(2)
where denotes the probability density function of given
. Due to the high PRF, the duration of each sub-dwell can be
made much smaller than the decorrelation time of the speckle,
and we assume that the radar scene is practically stationary
during this period. Thus, we assume that the number of scat-
terers in each cell, and the scatterers’ delays and Doppler shifts,
are constant during a sub-dwell. However, the scatterer am-
plitudes may fluctuate randomly because small changes in
range, on the order of the radar wavelength, may cause signif-
icant changes in the phase of the received signal [21]. We will
also assume that the value of the texture is identical for all clutter
scatterers within a cell and is fully correlated across a dwell [22].
B. Received Signal Processing
The processing of the received signal is identical in Sub-
dwells 1 and 2. Accordingly, we will use to denote the trans-
mitted signal (instead of and ), and only differentiate
between the sub-dwells where necessary, by means of a sub-
script. The received signal at the th pulse, ,
is given by
(3)
where and are the complex reflectivity, delay and
Doppler shift, respectively, of the target (if present), and
are the delay and Doppler shift of the th scatterer, respec-
tively, and is additive noise. We will henceforth assume
a high clutter-to-noise ratio so that the clutter is the dominant
component and additive noise is negligible. Since we only
consider transmitted signals of very short duration, the Doppler
resolution is very poor. Therefore, we completely ignore
Doppler processing and restrict our attention to delay or range
estimation alone.
The received signal in (3) is sampled at a rate to yield a
sequence . Note that is a scalar because
a single sensing element is being used to obtain it in contrast to
[17], where an array of sensors is used. The sampled signal is
matched filtered at each sampling instant to yield the sequence
. We define
to be the vector of matched-filtered outputs at the th delay or
range bin. Then,
(4)
58 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007

where defines the set of scatterers that lie in the th range exact solution for . Therefore, we attempt to find the max-
bin, is the index of the range bin that contains the target, if imum-likelihood estimate of given the observed data. With
present, and is the length of the transmitted signal , we then seek
. Analogous to (1), in
(4) is the target reflectivity, which, assuming a Swerling I point
target [14], is distributed according to . The (7)
function in (4) is the autocorrelation function of at
lag and is given by where is the probability density function of that de-
pends on . Since the maximization in (7) requires a compli-
cated multidimensional search, we instead attempt to find an
estimate of that maximizes , where the unobserved
or complete data upon which the observed or incomplete data
The concept of individual scatterers presented in this section depends is and
can be thought of as a limiting case of incremental scattering , where is the Kronecker delta. Re-
centers on the ocean surface [23], the combined responses of call from (5) and (6) that is the amplitude of the aggregate
which give rise to the clutter return. It is more convenient to scatterer in the th bin, is the target reflectivity, and is the
think of a single, aggregate scatterer in each bin with complex index of the range bin in which the target is located. Thus, we
amplitude seek

(5) (8)

which can be accomplished by the application of the EM algo-

for the th range bin, so that (4) is replaced by rithm as follows [25].
Starting with an initial guess , let be the estimate
of after iterations. Then, the EM algorithm is given by the
(6) iteration of

(9)
We henceforth take the view that the sea clutter return is the
result of reflections from these aggregate scatterers. From (2) (10)
and (5), we note that . Due to the indepen-
dence in the contributions of individual scatterers in (2), and where in (9) is the expectation operator. The details of the
the assumption of the texture invariance within a range-Doppler computations in (9) and (10) are described next.
cell, the texture associated with can be seen to be the The mapping in (6) between the unobserved and observed
product of the number of scatterers in the cell and the common data is linear, which indicates that the probability density func-
texture value associated with each one of them. tion of , given and , is
a mixture of complex Gaussian densities. We thus have
the linear transformation
III. TEXTURE ESTIMATION
(11)
The GLRT detector and the waveform design algorithm, both
require estimates of the clutter statistics. In this section, we de- where the first rows of the matrix
scribe the application of the expectation-maximization (EM) al- are given by
gorithm to the estimation of the speckle covariance and the tex-
ture values in each range bin.
Define as the
set of parameters upon which the probability densities of
depend. Note that, although the where indicates the Kronecker product. Each successive
texture is a random process, we consider its values in each bin block of the matrix is obtained by circularly shifting
to be deterministic but unknown variables because they are as- the previous block columns to the right.
sumed to be constant across a dwell. This approach is in con- Using the conditional independence of and in (5),
trast to most sea clutter research, where the parameters of the the probability density of , given , is complex multivariate
probability distribution that is assumed to model the texture are Gaussian with zero mean and covariance
estimated, rather than its actual values (see [24] for example).
The speckle however, is treated as a random variable and we es-
timate its covariance matrix . (12)
From (6), we note that there is a many-to-one mapping
between the scatterer reflectivities and the matched-filtered where is such that
vector. This mapping is noninvertible and precludes an .
SIRA et al.: ADAPTIVE WAVEFORM DESIGN 59

The log-likelihood function in (9) is therefore given by
(13)
where is a constant that does not depend on and de-
notes the matrix trace. Since is a linear function of , the con-
ditional expectation of (13), given , at is given by [26]
This solution must be found numerically and provides the
value of that maximizes (14). The algorithm defined by
(9) and (10) is iterated until successive changes in the parameter
values in drop below a set threshold.
The form of (19) and (21) makes it computationally expen-
sive to solve because simplifications afforded by the Kronecker
product cannot be used in (15) and (16) to obtain . A simpler
approach is to make the approximation , which is
likely in low-SCR scenarios. Then, (19) reduces to

(14)

which, upon substituting for from (20) gives

(22)

(15) the solution of which, together with (20), provides the value of
in (10). Clearly, this approximation causes an inconsis-
tency in modeling the covariance of the return in the bin in which
the target is present, where it results in an overestimate of the
value of the texture. However, as described in Sections IV-B and
V, this inaccurate estimate is never used. On the other hand, in a
(16) bin where the target is not present, the weak contribution of the
target return is further reduced by the weighting of the autocor-
The maximization of (14) is equivalent to the minimization relation function. This can be neglected as long as the autocor-
of relation function sidelobes are generally much smaller than the
peak at the zeroth lag. In practice this is easily achieved—the
(17)
autocorrelation function of the LFM chirp we use in Sub-dwell
1 has a highest sidelobe level that is 16 dB below the peak.
Since in (12) is a block diagonal matrix, (17) may be The use of numerical methods to solve (22) results in the
written as major computational burden of this estimation procedure. The
temporal variations of the speckle covariance do not appear to
have been reported upon. If it is considered to be slowly varying
over time, there may not be a requirement to estimate in (22)
at each dwell. This can lead to significant savings in computa-
tional effort.
(18)
IV. CLUTTER SUPPRESSION AND DETECTION
where is the covariance matrix of The dynamic design of is motivated by the need to im-
and is the th matrix on the diagonal of . prove the SCR in a range bin that is to be interrogated for the
Taking the partial derivatives of (18) with respect to and presence of a target. At the end of Sub-dwell 1 therefore, we
and equating them to zero, the maximum-likelihood estimate of wish to identify a putative target location. In this section, we
is obtained from the simultaneous solution of develop a GLRT detector that uses the estimates obtained in
Section III. The same detector is used at the end of Sub-dwell 2
to provide the final detection from this dwell.

A. Clutter Suppression
Prior to forming the detector, we seek to suppress the sea
(19) clutter. This is motivated by the differences in the correlation
properties of the target and clutter returns, as well as the inac-
(20) curacy in the estimates of the texture. The latter, which arises
due to the lack of averaging in (20), deleteriously affects detec-
tion performance. A key requirement for this procedure is the
knowledge of the covariance matrix of the clutter returns from
which the clutter subspace can be obtained. This is not available
(21) and must be estimated online. Next, we demonstrate that the
60 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007
clutter subspace can be obtained from the eigendecomposition
of the speckle covariance matrix , which we have estimated
in Section III. The covariance matrix of the matched-filtered re-
turn in (6) is given by
From the CG model however, given the texture and covari-
ance matrix and are independent if . Also, the
have zero mean and hence
(23)
where the scalar is a function
of the waveform due to the dependence on . From (23), we
see that the eigenvectors of are identical to those of , and
are waveform-independent. The space occupied by the clutter in
the matched-filtered return is thus identical to that of , the
speckle covariance matrix. This obviates the need to estimate
in (23).
Let be the matrix, whose columns are the eigen-
vectors, obtained by eigendecomposition, of in (22), corre-
sponding to the smallest eigenvalues of that together
contribute 0.01% of its total energy. In our simulation study, we
have observed that this typically corresponds to the 3–4 smallest
eigenvalues out of . The projection
(24)
provides the component of the received signal that lies in the
space where the clutter has the least energy and represents a
clutter-suppressed signal. We have assumed that the target re-
flectivity is circularly symmetric. Thus, some component of the
useful echo does get canceled out while some fraction remains
in the subspace orthogonal to the clutter, and thus in . Since
the clutter component in is very weak, the projection opera-
tion in (24) leads to improved SCR.
The determination of the interference subspace in principal
component methods for clutter suppression has been extensively
researched [17], [18], [27]. The method we have used is rela-
tively straightforward but still provides around 5 dB improve-
ment in detection performance at the end of Sub-dwell 1, as
shown in Section VI. This is significant because it helps to limit
the number of range bins that have to be interrogated in Sub-
dwell 2 and thereby reduces system usage.
B. GLRT Detection
With respect to a given range bin, we define the hypotheses
and to refer to the presence of only clutter or clutter and
target, respectively. We seek to form a detector based on the
log-likelihood ratio test, which for range bin is
(25)
where , and is a threshold
that is set to obtain a specified probability of false alarm, .
Since we only have estimates for the parameters in (25), we
instead form the GLRT so that
(26)
From (6) and (23), both probability density functions in
(25) are complex Gaussian. The detection problem in (26), is
therefore a test of Gaussian distributions with different vari-
ances [28]. With the estimates and obtained as described
in Section III, the maximum-likelihood estimate can be
obtained for an observed value of . Then, following [28], it
can be shown that the test in (26) reduces to
(27)
where are the eigenvalues of the covari-
ance matrix
is a pre-whitened version of
, where the columns of the unitary matrix are the
eigenvectors of , and is a diagonal matrix of the corre-
sponding eigenvalues.
The GLRT detector requires the clutter statistics for each
range bin. As discussed in Section III, the value of the tex-
ture in the range bin where the hypothesis is true, is typ-
ically overestimated. This is detrimental to detection perfor-
mance. One way of avoiding this problem is to consider a target
that is moving fast enough so that it is located in a different
range bin in successive dwells. Then, if the GLRT detector is
being formed for the th bin at dwell , we can use the esti-
mate obtained during Sub-dwell 1 of the th dwell as
the clutter statistics for the current dwell. Clearly, this requires
the assumption that the texture does not change significantly be-
tween dwells, which is reasonable if the time between dwells is
about 0.5–1 s.
It is important to select a suitable threshold in (27) to
permit efficient evaluation of detection performance via Monte
Carlo simulation. Assuming that all the values of in (27)
are distinct, we compute the threshold as the solution of
, where
This computation assumes an exponential distribution for the
test statistic in (27) [28], which is an approximation because the
weights are data dependent. However, we do not use this
threshold to analytically compute detection performance and
SIRA et al.: ADAPTIVE WAVEFORM DESIGN 61

make no claims to its optimality. Further, all the values of can with the total waveform duration and ,
be derived from data obtained in a previous dwell, thus making where is the number of samples in the designed signal. As
them practically independent of in (27). described in Section V-B, we will require the waveform dura-
It is possible, of course, to perform the detection in (26) on tion in (28) to be identical to that of . Consequently, the
the original matched-filtered signal , rather than on the clutter- number of samples in and is . The advantage of the
suppressed signal . We have found that this approach leads to formulation in (28) is that PM waveforms can be easily gener-
around 5 dB loss in detection performance. The reason is that, in ated, and the absence of any amplitude modulation permits the
this case, all eigenvalues of the matrix would be used to maximum power of the radar to be employed.
form the test statistic in (27). The texture estimation procedure Defining the autocorrelation function of as
described in Section III is not very accurate due to a lack of
averaging, leading to poorly estimated eigenvalues. The clutter
suppression described in Section IV-A reduces the number of
eigenvalues used in the detector from to , thus limiting the
effect of these inaccuracies. we want to determine the coefficients in (29) that minimize

V. WAVEFORM DESIGN
At the end of Sub-dwell 1, suppose that we have decided to in-
terrogate range bin . Excluding bin itself, all bins in the range
contribute out-of-bin clutter to the
matched-filtered return and thus to . The objective of our
waveform design in Sub-dwell 2 is to minimize this out-of-bin
contribution. To achieve this, we design the waveform in
Sub-dwell 2 such that its autocorrelation function takes
values close to zero at those lags where the clutter is estimated
to have the highest energy.
The synthesis of waveforms whose ambiguity function best
matches a specified function was first investigated in [29]. The
approach involves the selection of an orthonormal set of basis
functions whose cross-ambiguity functions were shown to
induce another orthonormal basis in the time-frequency plane.
The coefficients of the expansion of the specified or desired
ambiguity function on this induced basis were then used to
synthesize the waveform. This approach was further developed
using least-squares optimization in [30]. However, this method
cannot be easily used to synthesize waveforms where only a
desired autocorrelation function instead of an ambiguity func-
tion has been specified. In this section, we develop a method
that designs a phase-modulated waveform using mean-square
optimization techniques so as to achieve low autocorrelation
magnitude values at specified lags [31].
A. Synthesis of Phase-Modulated Waveforms
Let represent a unimodular phase-modulated (PM)
waveform given by
(28)
where the phase modulation is expanded in terms of an orthog-
onal set of basis functions as
(29)
(30)
where , and represents the (possibly
disconnected) set of range values for which the texture values
are large. The minimization problem posed in (30) can be seen
as a special case of a larger problem for which the PM signal
whose autocorrelation function best approximates a specified
function in a mean-square sense is synthesized.
It is relatively straightforward to show that the autocorrelation
function for the PM waveform in (28) is
(31)
where
, and . Using the squared magnitude
of , the gradient and Hessian of can be easily com-
puted and the minimization of (30) can be accomplished by the
Newton-Raphson method. Note that it is also possible to use
this approach to design two waveforms whose cross-correlation
function is small where the clutter is strong, which may then be
used in a mismatched filter for Sub-dwell 2. This will however
entail added computational complexity.
B. Implementation
The texture estimation procedure described in Section III pro-
vides an estimate of the th texture
. We then aim to design a waveform whose autocorrelation
function is negligibly small where is large. For simplicity,
we assume that the signal duration of and are iden-
tical. We choose the bins corresponding to the
largest estimated texture values to form the set , excluding
, which corresponds to the putative target cell. Since may
contain positive and negative lags, we form the set in (30)
62
Fig. 1. Generation of K-distributed clutter. The in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q)
components of the complex speckle variables are filtered to yield the temporal
6
correlation specified by the speckle covariance matrix . The correlated texture
is generated using the memoryless nonlinear transformation (MNLT).
with positive lags only, that, together with their corresponding
negative lags, account for all the elements of . Since this set
is discrete, the integral in (30) reduces to the summation
where the elements of are all integral multiples of the sam-
pling interval .
VI. SIMULATIONS
Our simulation model consists of a single moving target that
is observed by a single sensor in the presence of simulated
sea clutter. Individual clutter scatterers that are randomly
distributed in range and velocity are generated, and their am-
plitudes are sampled from a K-distribution. The received signal
is generated according to (3) and is processed as described in
Section II-B. Using a GLRT detector as in Section IV-B, Monte
Carlo simulations were used to obtain the receiver operating
characteristic (ROC) curves presented in this section. We first
describe the generation of the synthetic sea clutter.
A. Generation of Synthetic Sea Clutter
The simulation of sea clutter with meaningful correlations has
been the subject of much research (see [32] for a review). We use
the method described in [8] and shown in Fig. 1. The scatterer
amplitudes in (3) are generated as
where is the texture and represents the speckle component
that follows a complex Gaussian distribution with zero mean
and covariance . For the purpose of the simulations, the texture
follows a gamma distribution
where is a scale parameter and is a shape parameter. In our
simulations, we use and which results in highly
non-Gaussian clutter.
We aim to generate and in (32) with appropriate
correlations. While it is straightforward to generate correlated
speckle variables by independently sampling the real and
imaginary parts from a zero mean Gaussian distribution with
covariance matrix , gamma variates with arbitrary correla-
tions cannot be easily generated and a number of alternative
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007
Fig. 2. Correlation coefficient of the (a) speckle and (b) texture for the
Nov7starea4 dataset, range cell 1, VV polarization, of the OHGR database.
techniques have been proposed [33]–[35]. We use a memoryless
nonlinear transformation (MNLT) to generate the correlated
gamma-distributed texture variables [36].
B. Speckle and Texture Temporal Correlations
In order to simulate sea clutter with appropriate temporal
correlations, we derived correlation estimates from experi-
mental clutter data, collected at the Osborne Head Gunnery
Range (OHGR) with the McMaster University IPIX radar
[37]. Specifically, we used the procedure in [11] to analyze the
clutter data in range cell 1 of the Nov7starea4 dataset with VV
(vertical transmit and vertical receive) polarization, and the
resulting speckle and texture temporal correlations are shown in
Fig. 2(a) and (b), respectively. The variation of the correlation
properties of sea clutter with time does not appear to have
been reported upon. In this simulation, we will assume that
the speckle and texture are stationary processes. In Section III
however, the speckle covariance and texture values are dynam-
(32) ically estimated and therefore the stationarity assumption is not
necessary.
C. Simulation Setup
At the start of each simulation consisting of 25 dwells, the
target is located at a distance of 10 km from the sensor and
moves away from it at a near-constant velocity of 5 m/s. At a car-
rier frequency of GHz, this results in a Doppler shift
of approximately Hz. The clutter density is adjusted so
that we obtain an average of 20 scatterers per bin, each of which
is distributed uniformly in range over the extent of the range bin
and uniformly in Doppler over Hz.
The waveform transmitted in Sub-dwell 1 of each dwell
was chosen to be a linear frequency-modulated (LFM) chirp of
duration 1.5 s and a frequency sweep of 100 MHz. Note that
the LFM chirp was chosen because it is widely used in radar
and provides a useful benchmark for performance comparison.
In order to ensure a fair comparison, the LFM chirp was chosen
SIRA et al.: ADAPTIVE WAVEFORM DESIGN 63

Fig. 3. L norm of (a) the matched-filtered output r k k and (b) the clutter- Fig. 4. ROC curves for a GLRT detector operating on unsuppressed (dotted
k k
suppressed output r 0
, for a typical dwell with SCR = 35 dB. The true lines) and clutter-suppressed data (dashed lines). The numbers on the curves
target range bin is marked with an asterisk. indicate SCR values in decibels.

to have the same time-bandwidth product as the designed wave-

form, . Each transmitted pulse has unit energy and a total
of pulses were transmitted in each sub-dwell. The pulse
repetition interval (PRI) was 100 s so that the duration of each
sub-dwell was 1 ms, which is well within the decorrelation time
of the speckle component, as seen in Fig. 2(a). The sampling
frequency was 100 MHz so that the number of samples in
the signal was . The amplitude of the target return was
sampled from a zero mean complex Gaussian process with co-
variance matrix , where was chosen to satisfy specified
values of SCR. We define the SCR to be the ratio of the target
signal power to the total power of the clutter in the range bin
containing the target. It is thus the SCR at the input to the re-
ceiver. For the waveform design, we use phase func-
tions in (29).
Example 1: Sea Clutter Suppression The first example
demonstrates the advantage of using the subspace-based ap-
proach for the suppression of sea clutter. In this example, only Fig. 5. (a) Comparison of the magnitude of the autocorrelation function of the
designed PM waveform s [n] (dashed lines) with that of the LFM chirp used as
the Sub-dwell 1 signal, is transmitted. A plot of typical s [n] (solid lines). (b) A zoomed view of the former with asterisks marking the
values of the norms, and , is shown in Fig. 3 range bins with large texture values.
for dB. The range bin that contains the target
is marked with an asterisk. The ROC curves for this case are
shown in Fig. 4 for different SCR. For comparison, the ROC the autocorrelation function of is shown. From the zoomed
curves obtained by GLRT detection on the raw matched filtered view of the nulls in Fig. 5(b), it can be observed that the value of
data in (6) are also shown. It is apparent that a performance is indeed small in the range bins where the clutter was
improvement exceeding 5 dB SCR is obtained. The range bins estimated to be strong (which are marked by asterisks). How-
that are investigated in Sub-dwell 2 with a designed waveform ever, it is also evident that some sidelobes of the designed wave-
are determined by the detections in Sub-dwell 1. Thus, im- form are much higher than the corresponding sidelobes of the
proved detection in Sub-dwell 1, as evidenced by Fig. 4, results LFM chirp. Since these sidelobes occur where weak or negli-
in fewer false alarms to be investigated and leads to reduced gible clutter has been estimated, their effect on the detection
system usage and improved efficiency. process is negligible.
Example 2: Waveform Design for improved Detection In The ROC curves for different SCR values at the end of Sub-
the second example, we examine the performance at the end of dwell 2 are shown in Fig. 6. Note that these are conditioned on
Sub-dwell 2. For the waveform design, we used largest the actual target range bin being interrogated. We also show the
values of the texture estimates to position the zeros of the auto- ROC curves at the end of Sub-dwell 1 for comparison. We can
correlation function of . A typical result of the waveform observe around 10 dB improvement in detection performance
design algorithm is shown in Fig. 5(a), where the magnitude of when dynamic waveform design is used. For example, the ROC
64
Fig. 6. ROC curves at the end of Sub-dwell 1 (dashed) and using adaptive wave-
form design in Sub-dwell 2 (solid). The numbers on the curves indicate SCR
values in dB.
curve for dB SCR at the end of Sub-dwell 2 is comparable
to the ROC curve for dB SCR at the end of Sub-dwell 1.
Also, at a probability of false alarm , the probability
of detection improves by 76% and 30% at SCR of dB
and dB, respectively, when the designed waveform is used.
These gains may be attributed to the fact that the false alarms due
to clutter are significantly reduced when the designed waveform
is used.
In order to further investigate the benefits of dynamic wave-
form adaptation, we consider a scenario where a dwell is not di-
vided into sub-dwells and all the pulses transmitted are identical.
Here, pulses identical to the LFM chirp described in
Section VI-C are transmitted and the resulting ROC curves are
compared in Fig. 7 to the performance of the dynamic waveform
adaptation algorithm. As it may be expected, the performance
gains due to dynamic waveform adaptation reduce from those in
Fig. 6 due to the increased pulse integration because the returns
from 20 fixed LFM pulses are now processed together rather
than from 10 pulses. However, the gains are still around 6–7
dB. It is also important to note that the processing of each burst
of identical pulses assumes that the radar scene has not changed
during the transmission of the burst. Thus, as the pulse duration
is increased, it becomes less likely that this assumption remains
satisfied.
VII. CONCLUSION
The problem of detecting small targets in sea clutter has been
the subject of much research and has led to the development
of clutter rejecting waveforms and improvements in detection
performance. The knowledge about the statistical properties of
sea clutter gained in the last few decades was used to further im-
prove on these advancements. The application of dynamic wave-
form design to radar operations is a relatively new development
following the availability of flexible waveform generators and
waveform-agile sensors.
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007
Fig. 7. ROC curves using K = 20 LFM chirp pulses (dashed lines), and K =
10 LFM chirp followed by K = 10 dynamically designed waveforms (solid
lines). The numbers indicate SCR values in dB.
In this paper, we proposed an algorithm that utilizes the ben-
efit provided by waveform agility to improve detection perfor-
mance at low SCRs. Using a two-stage procedure, we first gather
information about the clutter statistics and identify a putative
target location. The knowledge of the correlation properties of
the clutter over a short time period is exploited by a simple, sub-
space-based clutter suppression scheme that enhances detection
performance. The waveform for the next transmission is dynam-
ically designed using a mean square optimization technique ap-
plied to phase modulated waveforms so that its autocorrelation
function is small where the clutter is estimated to be strong.
This design of the waveform minimizes the smearing of energy
from out-of-bin clutter into the range bin under investigation.
A simulation study was presented to demonstrate the perfor-
mance of the algorithm, and reasonable gains in the detection
performance over the nonadaptive case were observed. The ad-
vantage of the waveform design can be more readily appreciated
if the radar scene contains strong reflectors or emitters, such as
other targets or jammers, for example, whose range sidelobes
can mask a weak reflection from another target. The ability to
position the sidelobes of the designed waveform may have sig-
nificant payoffs in such scenarios.
The waveform design development presented does not in-
clude Doppler processing. Although most elements of the al-
gorithm can be immediately extended to range-Doppler estima-
tion, the requirement to transmit longer waveforms to obtain
meaningful Doppler resolution may invalidate the assumption
of complete correlation of the texture across a dwell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank Prof. M. Greco for providing them access
to the OHGR sea clutter database (with permission from Prof. S.
Haykin). They also thank Prof. A. Nehorai and Prof. L. Scharf
for insightful discussions. They acknowledge the comments and
suggestions of the reviewers which have resulted in substantial
improvements in this paper.
SIRA et al.: ADAPTIVE WAVEFORM DESIGN
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Sandeep Sira received the M.Tech. degree from
the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in
1999, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering
in 2007 from Arizona State University (ASU),
Tempe.
He was a Commissioned Officer in the Corps
of Signals, Indian Army, from 1988 to 2003. He
is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at
ASU. His research interests include waveform-agile
sensing, target tracking, and detection and estimation
theory.
Douglas Cochran received the S.M. and Ph.D.
degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard Uni-
versity, Cambridge, MA, and degrees in mathematics
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, and the University of California at San
Diego, La Jolla.
He has been on the faculty of the Department of
Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University
(ASU), Tempe, since 1989 and is also affiliated with
the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Since
2005, he has served as Assistant Dean for Research
in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at ASU. Between 2000 and 2005,
he was Program Manager for Mathematics at the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA). Prior to joining the ASU faculty, he was Senior
Scientist at BBN Systems and Technologies, Inc., during which time he served
as Resident Scientist at the DARPA Acoustic Research Center and the Naval
Ocean Systems Center. He has been a Visiting Scientist at the Australian
Defence Science and Technology Organisation and served as a consultant to
several technology companies. His research is in applied harmonic analysis
and statistical signal processing.
Dr. Cochran was General Co-Chair of the 1999 IEEE International Confer-
ence on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP-99) and Co-Chair
of the 1997 U.S.-Australia Workshop on Defense Signal Processing. He has
also served as Associate Editor for book series and journals, including the IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING.
66 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007
Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola (M’95–SM’03)
received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering
in 1995 from the University of Rhode Island (URI),
Kingston.
Upon graduation, she held a research faculty posi-
tion at URI with Navy funding. In 1999, she joined
Arizona State University, Tempe, and was promoted
to Associate Professor in 2004. Her research inter-
ests are in the areas of waveform design for agile
sensing, integrated sensing and processing, time-fre-
quency signal processing, and signal processing for
wireless communications. She is the editor of the book Applications in Time-
Frequency Signal Processing (CRC, 2002).
Dr. Papandreou-Suppappola is the recipient of the 2002 NSF CAREER award
and 2003 IEEE Phoenix Section Outstanding Faculty for Research award. She
served as the Treasurer of the Conference Board of the IEEE Signal Processing
Society from 2004 to 2006. She is currently serving as an Associate Editor for
the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING and as a Technical Committee
Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society on Signal Processing Theory
and Methods (2003-2008).
Darryl Morrell received the Ph.D. degree in elec-
trical engineering in 1988 from Brigham Young Uni-
versity, Provo, UT.
He is currently an Associate Professor in the
Department of Engineering, Arizona State Univer-
sity at the Polytechnic Campus, Mesa, where he is
participating in the design and implementation of
a multidisciplinary undergraduate engineering pro-
gram using innovative research-based pedagogical
and curricular approaches. His research interests
include stochastic decision theory applied to sensor
scheduling and information fusion. He has received funding from the Army
Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and DARPA to
investigate different aspects of Bayesian decision theory with applications to
target tracking, target identification, and sensor configuration and scheduling
problems in the context of complex sensor systems and sensor networks.
His publications include over 50 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and
conference papers.
William Moran (M’95) is Research Director of
Melbourne Systems Laboratory and a Professo-
rial Fellow with the Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, Australia. He has participated in nu-
merous signal processing research projects for U.S.
and Australian government agencies and industrial
sponsors. He has published extensively in both
pure and applied mathematics. He has authored or
co-authored well over 100 published mathematical
research articles. His main areas of interest are
in signal processing, particularly with radar applications, waveform design
and radar theory, and sensor management. He also works in various areas of
mathematics, including harmonic analysis and number theory.
Dr. Moran is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Member
of Australian Research Council College of Experts. He also serves as a Consul-
tant to the Australian Department of Defence, through the Defence Science and
Technology Organization.
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Stephen D. Howard received the B.S, M.S., and
Ph.D. degrees from La Trobe University, Melbourne,
Australia, in 1982, 1984, and 1990, respectively.
He joined the Australian Defence Science and
Technology Organisation (DSTO) in 1991, where
he has been involved in the area of electronic
surveillance and radar for the past 14 years. He has
led the DSTO research effort into the development
of algorithms in all areas of electronic surveillance,
including radar pulse train deinterleaving, precision
radar parameter estimation and tracking, estimation
of radar intrapulse modulation, and advanced geolocation techniques. Since
2003, he has led the DSTO long-range research program in radar resource
management and waveform design.
Robert Calderbank (M’89–SM’97–F’98) received
the B.Sc. degree in 1975 from Warwick University,
Warwick, U.K., the M.Sc. degree in 1976 from Ox-
ford University, Oxford, U.K., and the Ph.D. degree
in 1980 from the California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena, all in mathematics.
He is currently Professor of electrical engineering
and mathematics at Princeton University, Princeton,
NJ, where he directs the Program in Applied and
Computational Mathematics. He joined Bell Tele-
phone Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff
in 1980, and retired from AT&T in 2003 as Vice President of Research. He
has research interests that range from algebraic coding theory and quantum
computing to the design of wireless and radar systems.
Dr. Calderbank served as Editor in Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
INFORMATION THEORY from 1995 to 1998, and as Associate Editor for Coding
Techniques from 1986 to 1989. He was a member of the Board of Governors of
the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1991 to 1996 and began a second
term in 2006. He was honored by the IEEE Information Theory Prize Paper
Award in 1995 for his work on the Z linearity of Kerdock and Preparata Codes
(joint with A. R. Hammons, Jr., P. V. Kumar, N. J. A. Sloane, and P. Sole), and
again in 1999 for the invention of space-time codes (joint with V. Tarokh and
N. Seshadri). He received the 2006 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award
and the IEEE Millennium Medal, and was elected to the National Academy of
Engineering in 2005.