Joint Design of SAR Waveform and Imaging Filters Based on Target Information Maximization

In this paper, a joint design of both transmit waveform and imaging filters for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is proposed to improve its information acquisition capability. First, the mutual information between SAR image and target scattering characteristics is considered as the performance metric, and its equivalent analytical version is derived in the 2-D frequency domain. The design is formulated as an optimization problem with an energy condition and a similarity constraint. Then, to tackle the resultant non-convex problem, by referring to the Dinkelbach's method, an algorithm is derived to find the desired solution via a cyclic maximization procedure alternating between three subproblems. Based on minorization-maximization, a unified optimization method with an increasing penalty on constraint violation is proposed to solve all subproblems. Convergence of the developed algorithm is analytically proved. Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design.