Cognitive Target Tracking via Angle-Range-Doppler
Estimation With Transmit Subaperturing FDA Radar
Ronghua Gui, Wen-Qin Wang, Senior Member, IEEE, Ye Pan, and Jian Xu
Abstract—Cognitive radar is an intelligent active sensing
technique, which can learn the interactions between radar and
its surrounding environment and adaptively adjust the transmit
waveforms or parameters for improved performance. In this
paper, we propose a cognitive target tracking scheme via angle-
range-Doppler estimation with transmit subaperturing frequency
diverse array (TS-FDA) radar. FDA is an emerging array tech-
nique that employs a small frequency increment across its
array elements to produce a range-angle-dependent beampattern,
which provides promising applications for joint angle-range-
Doppler estimation of targets. In order to jointly enjoy the
advantages of FDA localization in angle-range dimension and
phased-array in coherent gain, we divide the FDA elements into
multiple subarrays and propose two optimization criteria, re-
spectively, based on signal-to-noise ratio and CramerRao bound,
to adaptively design the transmit weight matrix according to the
prior knowledge extracted from the cognitive observation data at
each transmission updating for improved tracking performance.
All proposed app roaches are veried by numerical results.
I. I NTRODUCTION
COGNITIVE radar distinguishes itself from traditional
radars in using a feedback link to connect the receiver with
the transmitter. It is considered as an intelligent active sensing
technique that learns the interactions between radar and its
surrounding environment and then adaptively adjusts trans-
mit waveforms or parameters for improved performance [1][3].
Current researches on cognitive radar can be divided into two
kinds, namely, interior and exterior, depending on whether the
source of prior information leading to the cognition resides
in- side or outside the receiver [1]. The knowledge-based
(KB) radar [2], typically driven by exterior prior information,
heuristically determines how and when the signal processing
chain should be changed. Its exterior prior knowledge, usually
stored in a long- term memory of the receiver, may be collected
from geographic maps [4][6], frequency spectrum sensing sys-
tems [7], [8], clut- ter statistical characteristics[9], and target
reective character- istics [10], etc. In contrast, cognitive radar
based on sequential Bayesian inference (SBI) [11][14] can pre-
dict the next target state by learning the inner experience and
knowledge hidden in historical data or observations, and then
adaptively congures its next transmit parameters to achieve
improved performance under designated cost functions. The
SBI-based cognition may be viewed as a short-term memory
since it is usually adopted by the receiver on the y [1]. To
achieve high-level cognition, long-term memory and short-
term memory should be integrated as an organic component in
cognitive radar system. One promising application of cognitive
radar is adaptive tar- get tracking [11][26]. Radar sensor and
tracker are generally regarded as completely separate entities
in conventional radars. In contrast, cognitive radar stresses on
jointly designing the radar sensor and tracker from a system
perspective. In early attempts, Kershaw et al. [15][17] pri-
marily investigated adaptive wave- form selection schemes by
minimizing the tracking errors in clutter. Additional waveform
selection strategies were proposed by Sira et al. [9], [18], [19],
[23], especially a wideband case was considered [21]. In fact,
the essence in a cognitive target track- ing is to adaptively
select suitable and tractable optimization criterions or cost
functions to update the transmit waveforms or parameters for
next transmission. The tracking mean square error (MSE) is
a natural selection, but it can not be analytically determined
in most cases. As an alternative, Cramer-Rao bound (CRB)
is often adopted as an optimization criterion. The pos- terior
CRB (PCRB) or Bayesian CRB (BCRB) [27] are also widely
used in target tracking literature, since it is a global lower
bound independent with specic parameters, unlike the classical
CRB. Tichavsky et al. [28] derived the sequential form of
PCRB for discrete-time nonlinear ltering, which was fur-
ther modied in [12] for adaptive target tracking. Furthermore,
Zuo et al. [29] derived more accurate conditional PCRB for
nonlinear sequential Bayesian estimation. Recently, Bell et
al. [3] developed a general cognitive framework for target
detection and tracking based on the predicted conditional CRB
(PC-CRB). The PCRB-based criterion was further used to
achieve adaptive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar
transmit beam- forming, referred to as cognitive beamforming,
for static target localization [13] and moving target tracking
[14].
: In practice, conventional transmit beamforming based
on prior knowledge, especially for MIMO radar, has been
widely investigated [30][33]. The transmit beampattern for
MIMO radar was respectively designed to maximize the power
around the locations of the interesting targets [30], to ap-
proximate a desired spatial transmit beampattern using signal
cross-correlation matrix selection [31] and to minimize the
Cramer-Rao bound for angle estimation [32], whose work was
further extended in [33] for phased-MIMO transmit beamform-
ing. However, different from these knowledge-based transmit
beamforming methods for static target probing where the target
location or the desired beampattern is assumed to be exactly
known, the target state in tracking before the next transmission
is actually unknown [11] and has to be predicted from previ-
ously received observation data. Exactly the predicting step
distinguishes the cognitive beamforming from conventional
knowledge-based beamforming. In this paper, we apply the
general cognitive radar framework [3] to transmit subapertur-
ing frequency diverse array (TS-FDA) radar for moving target under two criterions respectively based on SNR and CRB and
tracking via joint angle-range-Doppler estimation. FDA was compare the tracking performance under the two criterions.
first introduced in [34], which transmits thewaveforms with a The SNR criterion obtains a closed-form solution to the weight
small frequency increment across the array elements. Different matrix for a well focused transmit beampattern at the target
from conventional phased-arrays that provide only angle- directions, while the CRB criterion yields smaller tracking
dependent beampattern, FDA produces anglerange- time- errors at a cost of higher computational complexity.
dependent transmit beampattern[35][38]. Due to its angle-
A. Subsection Heading Here
range dependent beampattern that was extensively investigated
in the literature [39][41], FDA is widely suggested for joint Subsection text here.
angle-range localization of static targets [37], [38], [42][44]. 1) Subsubsection Heading Here: Subsubsection text here.
However, little work about the use of FDA radar for moving II. C ONCLUSION
target tracking has been reported. Different from conventional
target tracking methods [9], [23], where the target range and The conclusion goes here.
Doppler frequency are measured through pulse compression ACKNOWLEDGMENT
in the fast time, FDA radar can track the target via joint
The authors would like to thank...
angle-range-Doppler estimation [45] with slow-time sampled
pulses in each coherent processing interval (CPI). It is well R EFERENCES
known that the ranging performance in conventional pulse [1] H. Kopka and P. W. Daly, A Guide to LATEX, 3rd ed. Harlow, England:
compression is limited by the pulse bandwidth. This limitation Addison-Wesley, 1999.
can be overcome in FDA radar, since the target range can be
jointly estimated with multiple sampled pulses in slow time
and the ranging accuracy can be further improved via coherent
integration [46]. Since the basic FDA radar generates angle-
range coupling beampattern [47] and the FDA radar using
orthogonal waveforms [42] (i.e., FDA-MIMO) cannot focus
the beam energy in space, we divide the whole FDA elements
into multiple subarrays, where each subarray is configured as
a phased-array and a small frequency increment is applied
among the subarrays. That is, distinct carrier frequencies
are transmitted in different subarrays. In doing so, we can
jointly enjoys the advantages of FDA localization in angle-
range dimension and phased-array in directional gain, similar
to the phased-MIMO [48], [49] (but phased-MIMO provides
no range information of the observed targets). To further
improve the tracking performance, the FDA radar is equipped
with cognitive beamforming, which is achieved by adaptively
designing the transmit weight matrix under specific criterions
according to the prior knowledge extracted from previous
measurements. In summary, our main contributions are listed
as follows: 1) We propose the concept of target tracking
via joint anglerange- Doppler estimation with TS-FDA radar,
where the target range is estimated with multiple sampled
pulses in slow time. This tracking concept is different from the
conventional tracking methods that compress a single returned
pulse and provides potentials to improve the tracking accuracy
via the slow-time coherent integration in range dimension. 2)
In our target tracking model, the measurements are obtained
via joint angle-range-Doppler estimation and the measurement
noises are dependent on the target state.We extend the classical
Kalman filter, in which the measurement noise is assumed
to be independent with the target state, to be more suitable
for state-dependent measurement noise by predicting the noise
covariance and judging the rationality of the filtered estimate.
3) Cognitive beamforming is further applied in the transmitter
by adaptively designing the transmit weight matrix according
to the prior knowledge extracted from previous measurements